Tourism stakeholders upbeat about record buyer registration for Kerala Travel Mart

Visitors on the concluding day of the Kerala Travel Mart in Kochi in 2022.

At 2,839, buyer registrations for the 12^th edition of the four-day Kerala Travel Mart (KTM-2024) that will be held at Sagara-Samudrika Convention Centre in Willingdon Island here from September 26, crossed the 2,500-mark for the first time in the history of the travel mart.

The highest-ever total of buyer registrations at KTM that is said to be Asia’s largest tourism event, was 1,305 in 2018.

In a testament to the growing popularity of the biennial event, registrations by domestic buyers stood at 2,031 and by foreign buyers at 808. The business sessions of the buyer-seller mart will be held from September 27 to 29. Members of the public can visit the stalls on the last day, official sources said.

Of the foreign buyers, 67 are from the UK, 55 from the US, 37 each from Spain and the UAE, 36 from Malaysia, and 34 from Russia. As for domestic buyers, Maharashtra tops the list with 578, followed by 340 from Delhi, and 263 from Gujarat.

The event, with stalls under eight segments, will showcase Kerala’s strength in the tourism sector before a global audience, said Jose Pradeep, president of KTM Society, which is organising the event with support from Kerala Tourism and other stakeholders. “There is a surge in the number of buyers from the US and Latin America, especially from Brazil. The mart is fully digitalised,” he said.

The KTM will also give special focus to Kerala as a wedding destination and one that promotes responsible tourism and cruise tourism. The 11^th edition of the mart held in 2022 facilitated more than 55,000 business interactions. The buyers had totalled 1,134 (234 of them from abroad), while seller stalls totalled 302, the sources said.