'In India Sports Tourism still in nascent stages'

Margao, Feb 13 (UNI) With less than a month left for the World Cup to begin, travel agents and tour operators have started to come up with different schemes and packages to attract the travelers.

One such tour operator Vikram Dayal of Trust Travels, who also has played Ranji Trophy for Rajasthan, spoke to UNI on his company's schemes and the response they have received so far.

Dayal admitted that the bookings are a bit slow in comparison to last World Cup in South Africa. He, however added, that this time there are more end users rather than corporate incentive groups mainly because last time the ticketing conditions governing ambush marketing were sent after most of the large corporates had already committed their groups and done their promos unlike this time.

He said the factors affecting booking this time is the lack of advertising of the event itself. The West Indies comprise of nine countries who all get most of their business from US, Canada and UK tourism round the year. He also said that India's bad performance at the ICC Champions Trophy which was the big spend for most ICC sponsors like Hutch, Hero Honda, Pepsi, IOC meant that a lot of money went down the drain. These companies spent too much on a lacklustre tournament too close to the CWC, he added.

This resulted in sponsors starting their CWC ads, promos only in December and that too on a very small scale (unlike during CWC 2003), thus affecting the bookings.

Mr Dayal further said that in India there is not one agent which sells the Caribbean holidays on a decent scale with the result that people have to rely on CWC marketing to go there.

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