THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Despite being a pioneer in efficient use of digital tools and in initiating innovative campaigns, besides winning scores of international and national awards over two decades, Kerala Tourism’s official website, of late, has suffered a significant drop in traffic from abroad.
The state tourism department has found that foreigners’ traffic to its website www.keralatourism.org came down from 34% of the total visits in 2013 to 13% in 2017 (from more than 10 lakh annual hits to around 6 lakh). Meanwhile, the traffic from other parts of India doubled during this period (went up from 20 lakh to 42 lakh).
The reason behind this decrease in Kerala Tourism’s popularity among international travellers, according to tourism officials, is the competition from aggressive tourism campaigns by various Asian countries, including
Sri Lanka,
Malaysia, Maldives, Indonesia, Singapore and Korea. Time calls for unique campaigns to reach out to maximum number of potential tourists, they said.
Clint memorial online painting contest
In an effort to catch the attention of international travellers and with a target of reaching out to 50 lakh people across the world, the department has now decided to organize the ‘Clint Memorial International Online Painting Competition Season II’, in a bigger way. Held in 2014, the first edition of this contest for children aged below 16 years had resulted in enhanced traffic to the website from lesserknown source markets like
Bulgaria and
Romania.
If first season received around 5,000 entries from 35 countries and additional one million visits, target now is to have 15,000 entries (a minimum of 4,000 entries from abroad) covering 75 countries, which is of course a tough one to achieve. But, it is achievable as all information about this competition will be made available in at least 21 languages covering almost two-third of world population, the officials said.
Besides, Google and You-Tube will be major platforms for campaign and other social media platforms will also be used. The competition in memory of Clint will help give an emotional aspect to the contest by sending out a message that ‘ill-health can never be an impediment to a child’s creativity’.
The participants will need to create a painting on any aspect of Kerala, and Kerala Tourism will do all the help for them to learn about Kerala. Hundreds of photos and videos in the gallery of Kerala Tourism will be shared with them, and the competition will be a six-month event, most probably starting from August.
The prizes to the winners (in three categories-participants from abroad, India and Kerala) will include tour packages with families to Kerala, mementoes and cash prizes.
The website, currently, has around five million visits per annum and it is expected to get a minimum of 2.5 million visits and five million page views additionally during the campaign. The department is also expecting another 2.5 million visits to YouTube and other social media platforms.
