Federation of Associations in Indian Tourism & Hospitality (FAITH), the policy federation of all the national associations representing the complete tourism, travel and hospitality industry of India, has placed an urgent request on the opening up of India’s international borders to tourists and to permit all commercial flights in full strength to operate to and from India.

FAITH said that Indian inbound travel and outbound travel industry has been shut for the past 23 months.

In the pre-Covid year of 2019-20, Indian travel industry had received almost 10.9 million foreign tourists and almost $30 billion (₹2.12 lakh crore) in revenue and was engaged in travel planning for almost 26.9 million outbound travellers from India.

Both of those two lines of businesses have been completely closed rendering huge distress, unemployment and financial burden on employees and enterprises of Indian travel industry in the absence of that work.

A lot of countries have now opened or have announced opening up their borders to fully vaccinated travellers with the impact of Omicron subsiding.

FAITH has requested the Ministry of Tourism to take up with Ministry of Health and announce the opening up of our borders and resumption of full commercial flights with zero quarantine to fully vaccinated travellers across all Indian ports.

Extension of e-visa services

FAITH has also requested for extension of the free e-visa from the currently announced 0.5 million for the whole duration of 2022-2024 till our inbound travel recovers.

To ensure that Indian tourism is able to regain and then build on its global market share of 1 per cent FAITH has asked for immediate rollout of global marketing campaign across all digital, print, electronic and OOH media in all global markets of India.

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