The tenth edition of the four-day Kerala Travel Mart (KTM) will begin here on Thursday.

To be inaugurated by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, the September 27-30 event gains added significance this time as the organisers see it as an opportunity to showcase before the world the ability of Kerala and its people to overcome a calamity as grave as last month’s floods and landslides.

The Chief Minister will declare open the KTM at Grand Hyatt which will feature around 1,600 buyers, one-third of them from foreign nations.

Announcing this, the organisers said on Tuesday that KTM-2018 will have 400 stalls in this edition. There is an impressive rise in the buyers: 125 per cent increase in the foreign buyers, 75 per cent in domestic, KTM-2018 president Baby Mathew told reporters.

On three days from September 28, the KTM will host exhibitions and business meets at the Samudrika and Sagara Convention Centres in Willingdon Island. Besides, there will be four seminars where experts will discuss Kerala’s tourism sector in detail.

The 1,635 buyers at the mart are top functionaries of firms in tourism industry within the country and outside. Those from abroad total 545 buyers from 66 countries, including the US, Russia, Japan, China, Australia and Britain. The domestic buyers total 1,090. As for sellers, there will be 325 of them in 400-odd stalls. Public-private participation is a key feature of KTM-2018 that will have its delegates from the fields of travel and tour, hotels and resorts, home-stay, houseboat, ayurveda centres and cultural organisations.

Tourism, which is an industry with an annual turnover of ₹34,000 crore in Kerala, provides employment to 25 lakh people in the State. Cruise tourism will be a new entrant in the field, KTM organisers said.

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