By Marcellus D’Souza
Apr 25: Tourism Minister of Goa Rohan Khaunte said that “registration of tourism activities at the department will be made online within a week”.
“All activities related to tourism in the state will go online to facilitate ease of doing business to stakeholders,” Khaunte said. “EoDB (ease of doing business) is crucial. Business people should focus on business. All renewals will be online. End to end support will be provided and there will be no harassment to stakeholder,” promised Khaunte. With hotels in the state facing shortage of skilled staff, the minister added that skilling and support will be provided to local youth to make them employable,” he added.
The registration process will take 90 days and is available on www.goaonline.gov.in. The applicant must provide an email id, mobile no, name, address and date of birth along with OTP authentication. All documents have to be self attested.
A similar scheme was mooted in 2015 but received a cold response from the stake holders and the tourist visiting the destination. Goa Tourism was supposed to launch an e-commerce site to enable domestic and foreign tourists book online their board and lodging as well as activities like adventure and water sports, music festival tickets, restaurants and river cruises. A mobile app on android and iOS platforms is also expected to follow soon, along with a 12-hour call centre service, with an option of Interactive Voice Response System booking through international credit and debit cards, but the idea died a natural death.
Shack owners and adventure sports operators do to take to technology as it restricts them from making a fast buck. The price for an adventure sport is decided upon the clientele so are the prices of room rates, taxi rates which fluctuate depending upon the season and the necessity of the client. The same is true with the tariff rates in restaurants for food and drinks. Many a times the clientele is fleeced with a second menu card being presented at the time of settling the final bill.
Online booking helps the client so has the facility to make an advance booking and pay in Indian rupees at a predetermined rate as shown in the app or on the site. This cannot be changed by the restaurant, adventure sport operator or anybody else and is controlled by the government. It is for this reason there is so much opposition to prepaid app taxi’s at the airport.
This writer has travelled across the globe and “made taxi booking at airports and hotel booking from Mumbai, paying in Indian rupees. It is most convenient and hassle free. It is time saving and does not give an opportunity for bargaining or being fleeced by touts and unscrupulous people. On a visit to Spain, even restaurant booking were made from Mumbai. This saved us Forex and the hassle of conversion. Why can this system not be implemented in India so that everybody learns to fall in line instead of looking at every tourist – domestic and overseas as a potential target to be robbed and charged exorbitantly, spoiling the good name that is carried by the tourist place”?