Keeping the industry’s demand to expand the canvas of SATTE by incorporating new segments in mind, SATTE is exploring the possibility of launching few niche and emerging segments at its 21st edition in 2014. SATTE 2013 witnessed demand to have players from the MICE, Travel Technology and a few other segments. “The idea is to expand the horizon of SATTE and make it a bigger platform to offer more networking opportunities to our partners,” Sajid Desai, Group Director, UBM India. Apart from MICE and Travel Technology, SATTE also plans to rope in players from medical tourism and travel insurance field, he added.
According to him, Indian travellers are becoming more tech savvy with the advent of new technology. Citing PhoCusWright’s study, Desai said that one third of the worldwide travel sales will be made online by end 2013. Moreover, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube has changed the behavior pattern of consumers as well as travel trade partner. “This is the reason that we are thinking of having travel technology as a new part of our show,” he said and added that we already have presence of online travel agencies at SATTE and our endeavour is to make it more focused.
Similarly, MICE is also growing and most of the participants at SATTE such as National Tourist Offices of various countries, hotels and resorts and travel agents and tour operators among others consider MICE as a new revenue stream. “We are chalking out a strategy as how MICE as a tourism segment can be promoted at SATTE,” he added.
SATTE 2014 is scheduled to be held in New Delhi at Pragati Maidan from 29 – 31 January 2014 and in Mumbai at Nehru Centre from 3 – 4 February 2014.
