Southern States
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Tamil Nadu-Chennai
The best tourist deals
IN CHENNAI, it rains throughout the year. The temperature is constant through summer and winter. A year-round tourist season. Attractions: Marina beach, temples, churches and Mamallapuram. Veduthangal Bird Sanctuary, Guindy Snake Park, Crocodile Bank and Fort St. George.
Travel websites would have you believe anything. Some will market Chennai like above - spicy and sauteed in culture gravy. Others will serve them raw, but with the right mix to make a three-day- two-night visit exciting enough. Even to Chennai.
A `Travel + India' search will list a hundred odd pages, leaving critics to sift through for the best tourist sites. The topper this year is Traveljini.Com, an ICICI e- venture. It won the Critics' Choice and the Popular Choice honours of the Digit Web Awards for 2001.
It's not a portal that will market stone. Traveljini brings you some of the best deals ever. A three-day visit to Jaipur, with accomodation in the Trident, will cost about Rs. 4,000 per person. A six-night-seven-day trip to Cochin, Peermedu, Alleppey and Kovalam will cost just about Rs. 14,000 per person.
The rates get better with other Traveljini deals. The auction section lures visitors with a four-day for two trip to Dona Paula, Goa, at about Rs. 2,500. Weekend Getaways give you two days and three nights at Silver Castle, Kodaikannal, starting at about Rs. 2,000.
The travel site allows you to customise your trip, and combines a package of Popular Circuits, Honeymoon Ideas, Spiritual Journeys, Weekend Deals, International Travels and Adventure Trails. Flights, hotels and cab agencies are listed exhaustively. Also an exclusive page for `Visitors from the US'.
Quite expectedly, the site carries predominantly an ad-link to the Kerala Tourism website. Which takes us to other travel websites. Outlooktraveller.com is another portal with an exhaustive list of destinations, related services, discounts and bargains.
Top sites like Yahoo, Rediff, Sify and MSN too host travel channels with exclusive or tied-up deals. Surf them.
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Roadshows
Showcasing tourist potentials of various States and the hospitality sector in India by conducting roadshows is the main stay of the Travel Event Management, a Chennai-based travel promotion company.
The roadshows are conducted in such a fashion that it acts as a buyer-seller meet for its network of corporate clientele and travel agents, who can participate and negotiate with the hotels and get first-hand information on group packages and discounts.
These blitzkrieg provided a forum to interact with the stake holders of the travel and tourism sector. The show also served as an eye opener on various holiday destinations that are available in the country, which otherwise are not widely known.
Co-founded by Ashoka Ghatti and Zachariah George, the company has so far successfully showcased the varied tourist spots of Tamil Nadu and Kerala and currently a road show is being held in Pune.
And recently, the duo along with Johnny Abraham, a travel agent from Kochi and hoteliers, Jose Pradeep and Mathews George, have formed a company to market exclusively, stand-alone individual properties. A consortium of 20 hotels was part of the Kerala Holidays theme.
Thanks to the company, tourists bound for the southern States will at least have a fair idea of where they will be staying during their getaways, and how. For corporates, it is an ideal forum to chose gift holiday packages for their employees.
With headoffice in Chennai and branches in Kochi and Mumbai, the company will shortly open offices in Bangalore, Ahmedabad, New Delhi and Kolkata.
By T.S. Shankar and Feroze Ahmed
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