DH News Service, PANAJI:
As tourism players expected, Goa overplayed
its hand as "a destination where the party never ends". Captured by the
whirl of the media blitz and the lure of party lights, thousands thronged
here for the New Year high. Many were left stranded for accommodation,
but didn't seem to mind one bit, sleeping a few hours off on the beaches
or in Traxes and buses.
A resurgent economy has brought the bounce back to Goa's tourism industry. Arrivals, according to the state's tourism director N Suryanarayana, have scaled a new high at 2.02 million. The state's population is a little over 1.34 million.
In the domestic segment, arrivals shot up by 30 per cent to 17.5 lakh, and the 3.38 lakh international arrivals showed a 21 per cent spurt from last year. The overall tourist inflow last year was 17.5 lakh.
"The feel-good factor in the Indian economy, the success of the Incredible India campaign, our own sales pitch and the fact that we are the safest destination helped pull in the crowds," says Mr Suryanarayana.
So far 180 charters have flown in here, 32 of them from Russia. Russians today account for the second largest segment of foreign tourists to Goa after the British, and 45,000 of them travelled here last year, to the 1.2 lakh arrivals from Britain.
Expectations are that charter traffic will touch 590 long haul flights by April this year, against the 384 last year. ''The reassuring news is that no charters so far had a single seat vacant,'' says Suryanarayana.
On the flip side though, the enormous pressure of tourists at the end of the year told on the state?s infrastructure. Residences in the North Goa tourist belt at Calangute and Candolim were plagued by power failures and bank ATMs in the locality could hardly function.
The outskirts of Panaji were hit by a water shortage. Highways and village roads were so clogged with traffic that a distance of 2 kms between Calangute and Baga which normally takes 10 minutes to cover, took over an hour to negotiate.