Tourism Kamloops is always looking for new markets to target and now they’re zeroing in on one of the most populous places on the planet.

India has almost one and a half billion people and convincing just a small fraction of them to visit Kamloops would translate to a lot of money for our area.

While on the NL Morning News, CEO Beverly DeSantis, who just got back from India, talked about some of those numbers. “About twenty thousand visitors additionally. We’re close to two million right now so an increase of twenty thousand plus adding another night and if you do the numbers at perhaps another two hundred dollars per person, per night as an economic driver the numbers soon become very valid.”

DeSantis sees a potentially huge untapped market. “You’re finding a different demographic travelling so, India has one point five billion people, they’re not all going to come to Canada or start travelling but there’s a segment of India that we’ve identified that we want to target to and get them to come to Canada, specifically British Columbia and then specifically to Kamloops.”

Her trip came after they saw increased traffic to their website from the country, and the tourism Kamloops CEO thinks there could be a few reasons for that. “It may have something to do with our TRU students, our international TRU students that are reaching out to family and friends and telling them they are enjoying themselves here, that they should come and visit which is sparking that and that’s kind of the whole BC and Canada conversations, we get more and more international students as Canada is marketing more in these destinations, it’s creating some buzz.”

DeSantis added there are now direct flights from Delhi to Vancouver and the hope is to convince visitors to British Columbia to make a stop in Kamloops part of their itinerary.