More articles by

Anjuly Mathai
Anjuly Mathai

THE NEW TRAVELLER

Wander lust

56travellerssnorkelling Water watch: Travellers snorkelling in the Andamans | Sanjoy Ghosh

In a globalised and digitised world, where tribals own Facebook accounts and resorts offer ‘authentic’ village experience, how do you ‘discover’ a place where there might be nothing to be discovered?

There is a scene in the book The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri in which the protagonist’s father, Ashoke, is sitting reading a book in a train compartment. The annoying man next to him starts a long spiel about all the places he’s been to. So Ashoke, absorbed in his book, says: “My grandfather always says that’s what books are for. To travel without moving an inch.” That was true of an age, when you imagined faraway places through descriptions in books and movies. Those days, travel probably was an indulgence rather than the imperative that it has become today. I remember, in my parents’ time, travelling for leisure was a novelty. The first time they went to the US, more than 20 years ago, preparations went on for months altogether. Upon their return, presents were distributed to every member of the extended family.

Today, when there is Airbnb and budget hotels, very few travellers stay with relatives. No one bothers with bringing back presents for the entire family as everything you get abroad is probably available at your local department store. Travel has undergone a sea-change. It is no longer the luxury that it once was. Air-hostesses are no longer the exotic creatures they once were and no one really opens the foil on their plane meals like they’re seeing food for the first time in their lives. When I’d gone to Australia more than 15 years ago, I was asked whether I rode to school on an elephant. You’d have to be incredibly dumb to ask that question today.

58youngsters Complete package: Youngsters like exploring and not just seeing places like the Taj Mahal | Salil Bera

Things have changed. Today, travel has become extremely popular. Everyone talks about how they ‘spiritually evolve’ through travel and how it ‘expands your horizons’. Regions fully exploit their natural resources. When we went to Norway, we bought tickets to see an old, rickety bridge which, apparently, was quite the tourist pull. In the UK, my parents were told that the Kendall Castle was a ‘must-see’. It turned out to be in ruins and was nothing but a pile of bricks. India needs to learn a lesson or two from these countries on how to package its assets. Then there is monsoon tourism, wine tourism, voluntourism and a host of other tourisms.

According to a 2016 report by Euromonitor, it has become common for urban Indians to travel every two to three months. Online travel websites like MakeMyTrip have become the first point of contact for consumers when making their travel plans. This includes researching about a destination, gathering information about accommodation, location, language, cuisine and more, and making the actual bookings. Oyo Rooms pioneered the trend of room inventory management in India and Zostel became India’s first chain of backpackers’ hostels. According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, in India, travel and tourism’s total contribution to the GDP was $129 billion in 2015 and it is growing at a rate of 7.9 per cent per annum.

62-the-different-Indian

In the 1960s and 1970s, hippies used to congregate in India. They would exist on a dollar a day, staying in rented houses and spending hours chanting and singing on the beaches. Today, the dominant traveller is not the hippie but the millennial—someone born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. According to a 2016 report by the UN World Trade Organisation and its affiliate member World Youth Student and Educational Travel Confederation (WYSE), youth travel has become the fastest growing segment of tourism, representing more than 23 per cent of the over one billion tourists travelling internationally each year. These youngsters don’t exist on a dollar a day but instead live like nomads, often combining work with travel. They draw inspiration and generate ideas through their travel. They are heavily dependent on technology to get familiar with unknown regions. They will have many travel apps downloaded on her phone. Like Hopper for flight booking, Packpoint for packing, Circa for time zones, Accuweather for weather reports and Rome2Rio for transit connections.

In India, we did a survey to classify the different types of travellers. We divided them into categories like the careful planner (those who plan holidays well in advance with careful detailing), the escapist traveller (those who travel to escape the hassle of daily life) and the exploring traveller (those who don’t mind taking risks to explore new things for fun and adventure). But the new Indian traveller, while being a bit of all this, is what we have classified as the ‘total traveller’, who believes in the all-round experience of immersing herself in the local culture, food and lifestyle of the places she visits. She becomes part of her backdrop—helping the weavers of Varanasi revive an endangered craft, learning the local dances of Kerala, heading to the ancient hills of Jawai in northwest India, not just to see but to live with the tigers there, going on a culinary pilgrimage to the dhabas of Punjab…

The survey also rated the states of India based on tourist satisfaction, website assessment and state tourism score. Rajasthan, with its royal heritage and exotic camel safaris, topped the survey. If you want to enjoy the particular pleasure of vicarious travel, then read on to go on a whitewater rafting trip to Rishikesh, visit the centuries-old heritage houses of Goa and explore the unknown gems of Kerala.

The greatest modern influence on travel might be Instagram, which is slowly changing the way people travel. According to National Geographic, 500 million active users are sharing an average of 80 million photographs a day. As a photographer said: “Now you’re less than 10 clicks away from seeing an image on Instagram to purchasing a ticket to get there.” People are looking for that perfect Instagram shot. Today, we are almost obsessed with recording for posterity—or our Facebook friends—our exploits and adventures. When you’re in front of the mind-bogglingly magnificent Eiffel Tower, the most visited paid monument in the world, you’re more concerned about taking a photograph with you next to it than actually seeing it. But perhaps the sentiment has always been the same; what were souvenirs and fridge magnets in my parents’ time have turned into Facebook posts and Instagram photographs in mine. Perhaps the vanity of documentation is an incurable impulse in us.

60-the-best-states

Today, everyone wants to get a sense of the place they’re visiting. No longer does one hop from one spot to another during extended vacations to ‘cover’ places and make each paisa count. The new mode of travel is to spend time in one place, discover its beauty, walk down its cobblestoned pathways and enjoy the evening breeze on your face. The new traveller wants an authentic travel experience instead of going down the old well-trodden route.

But then, in this globalised and inter-connected world, what is ‘authentic’? Every place has been dissected and analysed on social media and the review pages of travel websites. I saw a WhatsApp message describing US President Donald Trump’s worst nightmare as a restaurant called ‘MEXIKHAN’ selling shawarma, burritos, tacos and falafels. It might be a joke but the best jokes underscore the truth. Every place is an amalgam of cultures so that no culture or place can be called exclusive or distinctive. It is a bit confusing whether a McAloo tikka burger is Indian or American. Indians consider Chinese food in India more authentic than Chinese food in China. When we went to Masai Mara in Kenya, we wanted to experience the culture of the place so we were taken to the village of the Masai, a semi-nomadic, polygamous tribe numbering around 1 million in Kenya. They welcomed us with a traditional dance called Ronkiny Onyokei, and a Masai man, who spoke flawless English, took us around. In the end, he saved our numbers in his smartphone and promised to keep in touch. When an experience is carefully curated and calibrated to suit the needs of tourists, does it make it less authentic? We went to Chokhi Dhani resort village in Rajasthan for an ‘authentic’ experience of Rajasthan. Of course, we got a taste of camel rides and traditional Rajasthani folk music. But how authentic was the experience really? If I went to a ‘real’ Rajasthani village, would I have enjoyed it more? If not, what is real and what is not? The lines are increasingly getting blurred.

If in the age of our parents, travel was about experiencing the world through new discoveries, in our age, it is about rediscovering ourselves through new experiences. Travel is about leisure and luxury. It is about collecting new experiences—whale watching on the Pacific coast, skiing on the frozen lakes of Canada, staying in a boutique hotel in Notting Hill. But make no mistake—that makes you a tourist and not a traveller. In a scenario where the whole world has become a tourist spot, has the traveller become obsolete? As Lahiri says in The Namesake: “Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”

Survey methodology

TWENTY-THREE Indian states were rated and ranked on tourism status based on three parameters:

* What does the state offer in terms of tourist spots and towns? The important tourist towns in each state were divided into five categories—hill station, wildlife, religious, historical and cultural, and beach towns—and graded.

* How does the state offer tourism to customers? For this, two types of surveys were conducted at each of the selected state tourism offices: exit interviews of tourists visiting state tourism offices and feedback of investigator visiting tourist offices posing as a tourist. The websites of the tourism boards were also assessed based on social presence, website presentation, mobile optimisation, paid search and organic search.

* How satisfied are the tourists visiting the tourist spots in the state—Tourists in 56 sample tourist towns from the states were asked to rate the friendliness of the tourist spot and how satisfied they were with the experience of visiting the town.

Four dimensions were considered in the final ranking and different weightage attributed to each dimension:

* State tourism score (50 per cent)

* Tourist satisfaction score (30 per cent)

* State tourism board website assessment score (12 per cent)

* State Tourism Corporation (STC) tourist interaction score (8 per cent)

This browser settings will not support to add bookmarks programmatically. Please press Ctrl+D or change settings to bookmark this page.
Topics : #Wanderlust | #travel

Related Reading