| | 8 May 2019HIGHERReviewIN MY VIEWIN MY VIEWTRAVEL, TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY SECTOR: A TRANSFORMATIVE PHASE By Sharad Kulshreshtha, Assistant Professor and Krishna Murari, Associate Professor & Head, Sikkim UniversityTravelling is an ancient phenomenon. Human beings are travelling since civilization for in search of food and shelter. In the present context this phenomenon is still continued for various rea-sons like, personal, social, economic, and po-litical. When travelling is associated with lei-sure, pleasure and recreation for a particular destination for at least minimum of 24 hours, it is called as tourism. Tourism and hospitality is an industry that creates a huge employment and also considered as engine of economic growth for inclusiveness. A sound economic condition, rapidly growing purchasing power, technologi-cal innovation, advanced transport mobility, introduction of GST regime etc. are some of the reforms that augment-ed the growth of travel and hospitality industry in India. According to UNWTO World Tourism Barometer esti-mates, worldwide international tourist arrivals (overnight visitors) have increased by 6% with 1.4 billion in 2018, which is more than the 3.7% growth registered in the global economy. Besides, there are exponential growths in millennial travelers. With the rise in millennial travel-ers, who are actually driving transformation by redefin-ing luxury in the hospitality industry, the segment is up for a change. Now destinations are more accessible due to better connectivity, visa facilitation, strong outbound from emerging markets, fuel prices stability, low cost air travel and accommodation, smart communication tech-nology to create platform for B2B, B2C, and effective in-frastructural growth etc. Technological advancement has revolutionized the service delivery pattern of tourism & hospitality sector throughout the world. New market dynamics are also affecting the con-sumer behavior. They are very prompt to adopt this change. Travel agencies, hotels and avia-tion sector is now more focused by investing in technologies i.e. artificial intelligence, clouds, big data, and mobile applications (apps) which help them to enrich the customer's experience. With the advent of disruptive change across tourism and hospitality sector there are many new start-ups coming to existence. The shift to experience has given rise to disruptive business models as tourists search for the genuine experiences. The peer-to-peer ac-commodation and travel platforms such as Airbnb, Home Away, OYO, OLA, and UBER are some word of mouth examples in this industry. These emerging technological changes have forced the transformation mechanism in the tourism and hospitality business from traditional to more technology centric for better understanding of the market need and consumer ease. In addition, the tourists prefer to stay in those hotels which follow sustainable green practices for optimizing energy conservation in the hotels. Regarding the capacity building, training, education and research in this field, now a days, many central, state & private universities and colleges are offering certificate, diploma, bachelor and master programmes with various nomencla-ture such as MBA travel and Tourism, MTTM, BTTM, BA (Voc) in travel tourism and hospitality throughout the Sharad KulshreshthaKrishna Murari
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