Now much sought after

[zainky]

The various industries and their ancillary
units comprising the tourism industry in Kerala are primarily concerned with
‘people’. Indeed, one of the most
important motivations for generating international travel is ‘meeting with
people’ or ‘seeing how other people live’.
Tourism in Kerala, therefore, can bring benefits other than the more
obvious and direct economic gains of contributing to the balance of payments,
increasing the national income and providing employment opportunities.





Although, these are not always possible to
quantify, there are considerable social benefits in the contacts made through
visitors who develop new tastes and become interested in new activities. Thus, it is highly essential that while
promoting tourism, emphasis should be on the people. In Kerala
holidays witness a marked increase
in tourists at all the prominent tourism centers and parks. This provides ample evidence to the shift in
the preferences of the people.





Tourism in Kerala thrives on the natural
values. But the number of such natural
values is fixed and immobile. This
imposes a constraint on the development of tourism. All the natural biodiversity reserves are
shut out to tourists and other visitors in order to preserve the natural
biodiversities.





Tourism in Kerala, being a service industry,
its product is of a perishable nature.
Prof. Howard Meek, former Dean of the School of Hotel Administration,
Cornell University observed: “There is no commodity more perishable than a
hotel room. If it is not sold tonight,
it can never be sold”. To this is added
the rigidity caused by heavy investment in fixed infrastructures like roads,
accommodation and transportation. In the
short run, the supply of this infrastructure is inelastic. Further, the ‘underutilization’ of some of
these resources poses a serious problem.
The tourist trade is also not very responsive to price changes in
Kerala. Dissemination of information regarding
price changes is also taking a long time to reach the target groups and is not
very effective. Thus major changes in
the tourism sector are long overdue.