Kenya is positioning itself as a high value tourist destination offering value for money and as the ultimate destination for Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) for India’s corporate travel market.
This comes hot on heels of a recent ranking by the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) that placed Kenya and Rwanda third as the most popular destinations in Africa for accommodating international meetings and events.
As part of the strategy, KTB has undertaken a week long engagement with India’s corporate travel market in Mumbaiand New Delhi. During the engagement, KTB interacted with at least 50 corporates that are actively involved in India’s MICE market.
A statement from KTB says that Kenya’s marketing arm further directly interacted with leading MICE corporate heads and travel purchase influencers to attract MICE to Kenya from India.
Leveraging on one-on-one interactions with prequalified frequent MICE buyers, KTB created awareness among Indian corporates on Kenya’s MICE facilities while addressing relevant queries.
KTB CEO Dr Betty Radier said that the marketing arm considers india as one of the important MICE markets.
“The two events enabled KTB to deepen its engagement with India’s travel market and to understand India’s MICE market.” She said.
KTB CEO further said Kenya is well positioned to take a major share of India’s growing travel market.
“Kenya is endowed with breath-taking landscapes, a magnificent range of captivating wildlife, a beautiful coastline that offers diverse magical experiences, an array of enriching cultural encounters, exquisite cuisine, vibrant cities and beautiful people propelling it to be the most preferred safari destination.”, Dr Radier added.
In January, KTB – in partnership with 10 members of Kenya’s travel trade, participated in the Outbound Travel Mart (OTM) 2018 in Mumbai, India. KTB used the OTM platform to reach out and engage with the outbound tour operators in order to drive awareness and convert bookings to Kenya.
India is Kenya’s fourth largest tourism source market, accounting for 6.5 percent of tourist arrivals to Kenya as at December 2017.
The Indian travel & tourism market is on the verge of becoming one of the fastest-growing markets in the world. The United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) predicts that by 2020, there will be over 50 million outbound travelers from India. The Indian travel and tourism market thus offers enormous potential for future growth in outbound travel. India, a country of over one billion people, has a growing middle class. This same growing middle class has a huge captive market for travel around the world.
