Brand JLF and Literary tourism

24 January, 2017, Jaipur: As the Jaipur Literature Festival draws to a close today, Jaipur has completed a decade of Literary Tourism. For the past ten years, I have been a witness to the growth of this phenomenon called Litfest.

The Pink City is facing a mammoth rush of domestic and international tourists who are here to attend the Litfest. The five-day festival is hosting writers, historians, poets, translators, editors and most of them are very prominent in their respective fields. The world’s largest free literary festival attracts more than a million book lovers from all over the world.

Their presence also revs up the local economy and bring smiles to the owners of many hotels, food joints, tour operators, and shops. Many small shops also benefit a lot from their presence and look forward to their arrival each year.

No wonder all the hotels get booked months in advance, flight prices get doubled and the trains, buses, and vehicles on rentals plying in the city are all jam packed. Restaurants and food joints are very much in demand during the Litfest. What is pleasantly surprising is that the demonetization does not seem to have had an adverse impact on the festival apart from some temporary chaos at the cashless counters which were more technical in nature.

Economically, the mega literary event makes huge business sense for the tour operators. They have added Jaipur Literature Festival to their itinerary to woo the national and international clients and curated their tour packages in such a manner that the visitors to the city get a feel of the JLF. Now JLF is an important element of the city's tourism calendar.

Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje, herself a book lover, has said on many occasions that JLF is a big time branding for Jaipur. The name of Jaipur, thanks to the Litfest, has spread to the USA, UK and even South Africa and some other places as well. This year, there is a plan to popularise Jaipur and the Litfest in Australia also.

It is indeed gratifying to see the festival visitors taking out time to visit the famous monuments of the city. Major tour operators like Cox & Kings and lodging networks such as Airbnb have taken this opportunity to give their clients the true ethnic, cultural and rural experience of Rajasthan by introducing packages and numerous activities for their clients visiting Jaipur. The festival did a remarkable job including Amer and Hawa Mahal as an evening venue. It nicely showcased these places to the tourists and many Jaipurites also.

Jaipur is widely known for the shopping experience it offers. Places like Johari Bazaar, Bapu Bazaar, Nehru Bazaar are flooded with avid bargain hunters. The tourists take time out from books to indulge in shopping for ethnic attire, exquisite handicrafts, traditional puppets, and bric-a-bracs.

In one of my sessions at the literature festival in Kolkata, I said that we now have medical tourism, heritage tourism, marriage destination or honeymoon tourism, film location tourism, the new addition to the list is the literary tourism as people have started travelling for the literature festivals.

JLF, in the past 10 years, has triggered several such literary festivals in other cities of India that has resulted in a growth in tourism. It would indeed be apt to say that JLF is truly the father of ‘literary tourism’ in the country.

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