PAKISTAN government has finalised its new comprehensive marketing strategy to be shortly approved by the prime minister aimed at significantly encouraging domestic and foreign tourism across Pakistan, says the Managing Director of Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation (PTDC), Salman Javed. “The strategy focuses on target centres, adventure tourism and religious tourism and hopefully it will attract huge number of tourists in Pakistan,” he further stated. In an interview with Khaleej Times, he said that the religious places of worships for Sikhs, Buddhists and other non Muslims were fast becoming the focus of attention in terms of their renovation, safety and other considerations so that they could frequently visit Pakistan without any hassle. A number of seminars and conferences in foreign countries, he said, were held recently to promote tourism in Pakistan. People from United Kingdom, Gulf, Far East including Japan were being provided special facilities to visit Pakistan, he added.

He said major international fairs like World Travel Mart London, Arab Travel Mart Dubai, Japan Travel Agency Mart and ITB Berlin were participated by Pakistani officials to promote tourism in the country. In addition to that, five South Asian tourism related exhibitions were also attended. “Then we had set up our Stand at Istanbul in connection with the Eastern Mediterranean exhibition. We have also organised an international Tour Mart in Karachi on June Ist this year in Karachi. We have come up with new website which is providing tourism related information in many languages including Chines, Arabic, Italian and French and this is a step towards E - marketing,” Salman Javed said. Responding to a question, the managing director of the PTDC said that all the 18 tourism information centres were being refurbished for which the government has provided Rs15 million grant.

He said that domestic and international packages were being launched to attract both the local and foreign tourism. To a question, he said that Malam Jabba tourist resort in Northern Areas has been fully renovated and its business has increased from Rs2.4 million to Rs10 million and it has now become a revenue generation resort. In reply to another question, he said there was a need to take up issues like human resource development and capacity building of the PTDC, which he, agreed was still very poor. “The main problem is the lack of funding for which the government has been approached,” the managing director of the PTDC said. There is also a need to remove the gender gap in the organisation by offering more and more jobs to the women for which the ministry of finance and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) were expected to provide the required technical and financial assistance. The focus, he pointed, was on the development of human resources and provide maximum training to women. In this regard, he particularly referred to computer training. Initially, he said that national internship programme will be arranged for which the Establishment Division has been contacted. About 40 experts have been engaged to impart training to the employees of the PTDC. For developing more tourist resorts, he said that 25 acres of land in Islamabad have been acquired which will be developed on Built Operate and Transfer (BOT) basis.

Similarly, two plots each in Karachi and Azad Kashmir were being acquired for establishing tourist resorts there. And the whole process is very transparent as 34 local and foreign applications were received for developing these tourist resorts. He said that PTDC has decided to build its own six storied building in Islamabad to have its headquarters there on Kashmir Highway. Four of the stories, he said, will be rented out. “It will solve our financial problems,” he said. Javed also informed that all the motels of the PTDC were currently being renovated to attract sizable tourism in the country. He said Lahore-New Delhi Bus Service was progressing quite well.