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The Indian traveller’s passion to explore has led to many success stories in the tourism sector.
While several travel start-ups have come up in the past two to three years to tap the growing potential of the domestic travel sector, worldwide publishing institution Lonely Planet will soon join the league and publish guide books customised for domestic travel.
After launching outbound travel guides specifically designed for Indian travellers, Lonely Planet will now launch its special guide book series for domestic travel titled “Short Escapes” for the metro travellers.
Launch today
The guide books that will hit the stands on Monday will cover holiday destinations in and around the three metros of Bangalore Delhi and Mumbai.
The guide books will feature spas, hotels, restaurants and resorts in the holiday destinations in these regions. Priced at Rs 395, the Indian traveller series would have the yellow and pink colour on the cover as compared to its otherwise blue façade.
“The launch is in line with Lonely Planet’s aggressive publishing strategy for the domestic travel market of India that is growing at an average rate of eight to 11 per cent. In fact, statistics indicate that domestic tourism forms 77 per cent of the total number of Indian travellers,” said Sesh Seshadri, General Manager, Lonely Planet India.
According to official figures, domestic tourism grew at the rate of 13.8 per cent in 2011, growing from 748 million in 2010 to 851 million in 2011.
Focus on rail travellers
Lonely Planet plans to launch at least two domestic travel guide books every month designed for Indian travellers.
The publishing house will also be producing comprehensive State guide books starting with Rajasthan and Goa.
“We also plan to address the rail travellers that form a big slice of domestic travellers in India and launch low-cost books titled ‘Shatabdi Escapes’ and ‘Summer Escapes’ for that segment,” Seshadri added.
In the medium term, Lonely Planet will also produce its travel guides in regional languages starting with Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati.
“Our target is to reach 35 guides customised for the Indian traveller, out of which 15 will be for domestic travel. We neither have advertising in our guides nor do we accept freebies.
“We have a selected group of 25 authors for our India series who will offer neutral unbiased facts to the Indian travellers,” Seshadri added.
Lonely Planet will print 5,000 to 15,000 prints of the domestic travel guides depending on a case to case basis.
>nivedita.ganguly@thehindu.co.in
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