Blue Mountains. Promoting the region in India

Tourism representatives from Blue Mountains, Sydney, the South Coast and the Mid North Coast are meeting this week with agents, product managersand travel trade media in Mumbai and Hyderabad, India. The NSW Government has invested $57,500 to help nine NSW tourism operators attend trade events in India to promote the state’s tourism experiences and attractions. Minister for Tourism, Jodi McKay, said India was an important and growing tourism market for NSW with almost half of all Indian visitors to Australia last year coming to NSW. In the year ending December 2009, 55,300 Indian visitors travelled to NSW spending more than 2.1 million nights here and injecting $179 million into the state’s economy. The latest outlook from the Tourism Forecasting Committee suggests the number of Indian visitors to Australia will more than quadruple to around 459,000 by 2018