Brand USA India Working Hard to Bring Indian Travelers to the USA
Brand USA India is pulling out all the stops to boost the number of Indian travelers to the United States, conducting familiarization tours, offering a travel trade webinar, promoting the USA Discovery Program and preparing for the India sales mission.
Exploring the South during a Brand USA familiarization tour, four senior travel agents from Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and New Delhi who specialize in free independent travel (FIT) visited Atlanta and Savannah in Georgia and St. Augustine, FL from May 26-June 1 to learn more about the region to promote it to their clients.
In Atlanta, the group visited the World of Coca-Cola and Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and met two key Indian receptive tour operators, Discover Destinations and Tours Limited, to learn about promoting Atlanta. In Savannah, they met with Brand USA partners, Visit Savannah and Visit Tybee and enjoyed Old Savannah trolley tour and a ghost tour at night. The trip ended in St Augustine with a meeting with the Casa Monica Resort and the St Augustine & Ponte Vedra tourism board. The travel agents then attended IPW 2019, the leading international travel trade show, in Anaheim, California.
Another group of Indian travel and lifestyle journalists enjoyed another Brand USA familiarization tour which followed the southern musical trail in Tennessee and Louisiana. From May 26-June 1, the journalists discovered the musical legacy of three key cities - New Orleans, Louisiana, where they experienced the vibrant blues and jazz music scene; Memphis, Tennessee, the city that formed the soul of Rock n Roll; and concluding with their last stop in Nashville, Tennessee, the heart of country music. They experienced the culinary delights, exciting nightlife and parks and museums in each city. The group also attended IPW 2019.
An India webinar was presented on April 24 to the travel trade to create product awareness about Massachusetts, Utah, Alabama, and Oregon. The webinar, focusing on unique tourism offerings in those states for leisure travelers from India, attracted over 380 attendees from 51 cities and towns and across 21 states in north, west, south and east India.
In other significant news, Brand USA India crossed the 12,200+ badge mark in May 2019 on the USA Discovery Program, Brand USA’s official online agent training tool about the diverse destinations and experiences available in the USA. The program, which allows the travel industry to be accredited as USA specialists, is very popular among the Indian travel trade.
Brand USA also is gearing up for its eighth India sales mission which takes place in Chennai, Mumbai, and New Delhi from September 22-27. A delegation of 35 companies and 47 delegates from the United States is expected to take part in the sales mission.
