Kerala Tourism to organise Grand Kerala Shopping Festival in December, 2008  
 
Saturday, July 05, 2008, Kerala Tourism, in order to promote the state and make it a shopping paradise, will organise 45 days long Grand Kerala Shopping Festival, starting December 1, 2008 to January 15, 2009. The Government of India has already allocated Rs 20 crore for the festival. The state tourism will also host Kerala Travel Mart (KTM), a Business to Business (B2B) event in Kochi from September 20 to 23, 2008, presenting international travel and tourism trade with perfect opportunity to make fresh contacts, strike deals and discover new realms of success. The state has introduced Green Season package for the middle class families. 

Kerala Tourism organised a road show to tap the growing Punjab market, at Hotel Taj, Chandigarh, yesterday. The road show offered an opportunity for the travel trade in the city to interact with their counterparts from Kerala. Inaugurating the event, Geetika Kalha, Secretary, Tourism, Government of Punjab said, “Kerala Tourism has a lot to offer for tourists in this area. The concept of home stay in Kerala is appreciable. Punjab Tourism is also going to start such concept in farm houses located in various places of the state. Following the spa facilities in Kerala, the Ananda Group is considering the introduction of such facilities in Mohali.”

Speaking on the event, M Sivasankar, Director, Kerala Tourism added, “The road show conducted in Chandigarh, is part of our promotional campaign to reach the domestic market. A string of road shows are being organised in seven key markets like New Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai and Chandigarh. We are also planning to host the same in Ludhiana. For this, we have approached the travel companies based in Chandigarh to highlight our packages in the city and around. We have also launched a series of classification system for ayurveda, house boating and home stay, in order to maintain a quality to ensure standardisation.”

Marching aggressively ahead of all the other states, Kerala is scaling new heights in tourism. The state registered a remarkable increase in domestic and international tourists during 2007.While international arrivals recorded a significant 20.37 per cent increase over the previous year's figures, the domestic tourist arrivals marked a 5.92 per cent increase. 
 

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