Look beyond Istanbul – Turkey’s tourism campaign to woo Indian tourists
Pamukkale, Turkey
After their recent participation in the trade exhibitions in India, Turkish tourism industry is eyeing on Indian Metro cities to develop wedding and Mice tourism in their country. The tourism department is planning to have campaigns to lure people from Chennai and other metros.
Recently Indians are showing interest in conducting wedding and other important functions abroad. They are less hesitant to spend money to make the functions as grand as possible. Turkish tourism department is trying to exploit this tendency and showcase their historical monuments and other world renowned tourism spots to the MICE and Destination Wedding enthusiasts.
We already got confirmation from around 15 big Indian wedding parties,” sad H Denis Ersoz, Culture & Tourism Counselor, Embassy of Republic of Turkey in India.
“Our focus is to showcase Turkey beyond Istanbul. The tag line would be to ‘Look beyond Istanbul,” he added
About 90 per cent of the hotels in turkey offer all-in-one packages, but the Indian market are not much aware of these offers. Therefore, the department’s efforts would be to propagate this to the potential markets.
Turkish tourism department is planning joint promotional campaigns this month with the leading Indian tour operators to exploit the Wedding and MICE tourism market. The campaigns will be conducted in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata and some other major cities.
Turkey has targeted two lakhs Indian visitors this year. The maximum number of Indian visitors to Turkey was in 2015 and it stood at 1.32 lakhs.
Indian Wedding in Turkey
Earlier, Ersoz had meetings with Union Tourism Ministry officials in India, on reviving the mechanism to explore scope of mutual cooperation in tourism. Turkey is also planning a JWG meeting in Istanbul in October- November this year.