THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:
Three major campaigns launched by Kerala Tourism, including the one on blooming of Neelakurunji flower, and the Clint Memorial International Painting Competition, helped Kerala Tourism’s website — www.keralatourism.org – get an all-time high traffic in 2018-19, with the portal receiving 10,252,887 visits/sessions from 71,32,491 users.
This stood in sharp contrast to the year 2017-18 (April 1, 2017-March 31, 2018) when the website could muster only 41, 02, 061 sessions or visits from 31,61,986 users. Also, the traffic for the website came from 19,140 cities during 2018-19 as compared to 14,219 cities a year earlier.
Besides Neelakurinji campaign launched during the once-in-12-year blooming of Neelakurinji flowers and the Clint Memorial International Painting Competition, the third was an innovative post-flood campaign in 20 Indian cities and 20 cities from abroad. The cities were selected on the basis of traffic from those places to the website.
Campaign materials were produced in 23 languages and these included both Indian and foreign languages. However, it was the Clint Memorial International Painting Competition that turned out to be the most effective of the three campaigns, which was targeted at children with the objective of taking the name ‘Kerala’ to five million homes around the world. This particular campaign fetched 48,390 registrations from 134 countries and 38,000 entries from 97 countries.
In fact, the most viewed page in the website this year was that of Clint’s in the website. The landing pages of Neelakurinji and Ayurveda stood at the second and third place, respectively.
Tourism Minister Kadakampally Surendran said the launch of the three well-crafted campaigns during 2018-19 made this achievement possible for Kerala Tourism’s website. “We are living in a techno-savvy age, and it is imperative to pack the tourism portal with interesting details that can engage tourists on a sustained basis. I am happy that Kerala Tourism’s website has been making huge strides in terms of popularity from visitors from across the world.”
Tourism Secretary Rani George said the huge increase in the website’s traffic is a robust proof of recognition for Kerala Tourism not just from India but also from various parts of the globe. “We are constantly launching new products to help spread the uniqueness of the state as a tourism destination across all segments of the population spread across various geographies.”
Tourism Director P Bala Kiran said an analysis of the visits/sessions on the website revealed that people were interested in exploring sections like micro sites on Christianity, Festivals, Ecotourism, Responsible Tourism and Padayani, a traditional folk dance and a ritual art. Another noticeable trend is that around 80 per cent of the users used mobile phones to access the site as compared to 60 per cent during 2017-18.
With more than 10 million visits, www.keralaltourism.org has maintained its first position among government tourism sites in India, including the Central government’s www.incredibleindia.org. Kerala Tourism’s portal now competes with the tourism websites of countries like Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Korea, and Australia for higher ranking. It stands at the 7th position among tourism board sites of various countries of the Middle East and Asia- Pacific.
