Daily Times

KARACHI: With the recent investments in Gwadar port and the influx of Chinese investments through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), tourism within the country is expected to increase in the years ahead making it a very attractive hub for investments in the tourism and hotel business.

This was stated by Tina Wang, the Managing Director of Jovago, Pakistan, which is an international venture by Rocket Internet, specializing in hotel and vacation rentals globally.

Ms Wang, while talking to Daily Times, further added that local demand for traveling within Pakistan is increasing year on year, with an expected number of 50+ million domestic tourists forecasted by the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation (PTDC). This shows a lot of potential in the tourism industry and all travel related businesses. However, the negative perception of Pakistan due to security problems will continue to pose a challenge in the coming years and it is one thing that themedia and government should collaborate on to improvethe situation for the better.

The total contribution of Travel & Tourism to the GDP was Rs 1,918.5 billion (7.0% of GDP) in 2015. It was forecasted to rise by 4.4% in 2016, and to rise by 5.5% per annum to Rs 3,418.7 billion (7.0% of GDP) in 2026.

“You can find almost every type of hotel in all areas of Pakistan except for in extremely remote places. It has been observed that most of these hotels fail to meet customer expectations because they are uninformed on what a customer values and what their competitors are providing to their customers. Through Jovago, we are trying to bridge this information gap between hotels and consumers by providing extensive customer reviews and feedback on our website. Our customer service department collects detailed feedback from our customers about their stay in any particular hotel and publishes it on our website so that all the information regarding customer experiences and expectations is available to the hotels which can be used to further improve their quality of services”.

So far Jovago has more than 2000 hotels spread across 150 cities across all 4 provinces of the country. “We aim to address the entire budget range of our customers, so we do not focus on a specific segment; rather we want to offer as much choice as possible. This is one of the reasons that on our website you can find a hotel which is as cheap as Rs 600 per night to hotels that cost more than Rs 90,000 per night’, stated Wang.

These days, foreign travel has become more of a hassle and is extremely expensive due to the constant devaluation of the rupee andrising visa issues. Due to these reasons, people are traveling to Pakistan.

In fact at Jovago, Wang affirms they are “in touch with many international travelers, and they have in fact been approaching us about travel in Pakistan”. One of the main reasons they launched was to encourage more people to come to Pakistan. Through their social media marketing strategies: blogs, facebook, Instagram, and twitter, they believe they are reaching a large audience.

Jovago has received a tremendous response in their first year of, both from their hotel partners as well as their customers since Jovago’s mobile application has already scored 10,000 downloads on android.