Date: 24th Feb 2012 Outbound Travel Mart  (OTM) Exhibition:
Location: Pragati Maidan, New Delhi
Speaker: Mr.Saurabh Jain-Senior Consultant

Outbound Travel Mart (OTM) organized its annual Delhi leg of exhibition for tour operators, travel agencies & hotels from February 24th-26th, 2012 at Pragati Maidan. OTM organizes this exhibition every year for the specific purpose of outbound tourism where visitors may get to know certain destinations, the choice of hotel chains operating there & the tour operators engaged in the business of arranging packages. OTM also caters extensively to the MICE (meetings, Incentives, conventions & events) segment.
Skyline Business School, being among the premier tourism management education institutes in Delhi was invited to the exhibition. Mr. Aritro Dasgupta, Faculty & Marketing Manager, represented Skyline by visiting the exhibition on February 25th, 2012. It was a gala event with more than 200 hotels represented. They came from different parts of the country. The states best represented in the fair were- Jammu & Kashmir, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Assam, and Uttarakhand & Himachal Pradesh. There were separate pavilions for different slots of destinations. The mountain attraction destinations were stacked together, while ocean attraction destinations were stacked together in another area of the hall. There was also an area designated to stalls of international agencies, mostly tourism development boards of various countries. China, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Philippines, Uzbekistan, Sri Lanka, Australia, Russia etc. were some countries represented. The one drawback which has been observed about the event was that options were far too many to lead to direct visitor conversions. 30 plus options for 1 single Indian state leaves the tourist confused. So it ended up at times as a pure information collection venture where visitors simply stacked up the brochures & leaflets of all stall holders.
Overall a successful event with high level of footfalls & all information required was eventually provided to visitors. In addition each visitor also received a complimentary gift coupon as a token of appreciation for being in some way a part of the tourism industry.     
Compiled by- Aritro Dasgupta