Thiruvananthapuram: It has now become a habit for the Tourism Department to claim increasing annual arrival figures. The Planning Board but has called the Department’s bluff. The Board, employing a unique methodology based on the per capita GDP of Euro countries, has punctured the Department’s optimism on foreign tourist arrivals. “The Department of Tourism places the tourism arrival figure at three million for 2020 with annual growth rate of 15 per cent per annum, which far exceeds the projections made by us,” the Board’s Perspective Plan 2030 states. The Board estimates that the foreign arrivals to the state will only be 1.86 million by 2020.
According to the Board, the magic figure of three million foreign arrivals will be achieved only a decade later, in 2030. The Board’s methodology demonstrates that economic upheavals badly affect foreign arrivals. It shows that the income elasticity of a foreign tourist’s visit to Kerala in relation to the per capita GDP of Euro countries is 3.3. This means that a one per cent increase/decline of Euro area’s per capita GDP leads to 3.3 per cent increase/decline in the visit of foreign tourists to Kerala. Going by this equation, foreign arrivals should have come down drastically rather than up as claimed by the Department. Countries like UK, USA and Canada, from where Kerala gets the bulk of its foreign arrivals, have still not come out of the financial crisis. Growth in Kerala’s tourist flow remains consistently lower than the national average growth in tourist flow, the Board’s ‘perspective plan’ adds. Reason for Kerala’s disappointing tourism performance: “innovative products and services are still scarce.”
“The economy is dominated by low knowledge and low technology intensive tourism small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The Board’s ‘perspective plan’ says that the tourism industry of Kerala is still not a part of this knowledge economy. “New products and services have appeared in the tourism sector with the emerging global knowledge economy. These are income-inelastic and more stable,” it says.
