Madhya Pradesh has been eyeing spot in top five tourist destinations in the country in order to attract investors and tourists for which a survey was conducted to look at the challenges and improvements the state can make to achieve the desired target.
However, the outcome of the survey is sure to mount pressure as the statistics revealed that Madhya Pradesh has less than 500 hotels having 25 rooms capacity while top 34 tourist destinations lack any form of recreational activities be it ropeway, amusement park, museum and theme parks, which, in turn, affected the footfall.
In order to address this concern, Madhya Pradesh Tourism Board has revealed a wide infrastructure gap in tourism sector and stressed on urgent need to bring in more branded hotels at tourist destinations and promote recreational activities to attract footfall for which the state has tweaked the tourism policy to incorporate water and adventure activities at notified water bodies with attractive sops.
Other than the recreational activities, other aspects which came to light were concerned with hospitality and it was revealed that of all the cities in Madhya Pradesh, Khajuraho is the only tourist destination with the presence of branded hotels. And, the last one to come up was in the year 2008 and since then there has been no influx of branded chains at any tourist destinations in the state.
It is worth noting that a total of 1,480 hotels were surveyed, of which just 33 per cent were found to have minimum of 25 rooms. Indore followed by Ujjain has the highest number of standard hotels, the survey showed and in order to improve on this aspect, the officials are working to promote scenic and outskirt places as wedding destinations owing to encouraging enquires and feedback from hoteliers as it is because of the limitation of the area that people are compelled to move outskirts in order to host functions.
With the required infra amendments and by addressing the challenges, MP will sure leap to the top 5 spots in tourism.
