THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Kerala Tourism won three Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) gold awards, including the one for an ethnic food restaurant run by women at Kumarakom in Kottayam.
Tourism Minister Kadakampally Surendran and Tourism Director P Bala Kiran received the awards during the PATA Travel Mart 2019 at Nur-Sultan (Astana) in Kazakhstan.
The two other gold awards were for an advertisement campaign of Kerala Tourism — Come Out and Play — and for its website (www.keralatourism.org).
“I am especially happy to receiving the gold award for the women-run restaurant at Kumarakom under Responsible Tourism Mission (RTM), which has become the mainstay of our tourism policy and initiatives. Of the 15,500 RTM initiatives, 13,500 units are led by women,” said Kadakampally said after receiving the award.
The website aims at providing Kerala Tourism an edge online. It had 10 million visits in the 2018-19 fiscal year and is among the top 10 tourism websites in Asia.
It also hosts almost one lakh web pages and major sections of the site are available in 23 languages. The portal now competes with tourism websites of countries like Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Korea and Australia for higher ranking.
Last year, Kerala Tourism bagged two PATA gold awards for its Yalla Kerala print media campaign in the Gulf countries and for an innovative poster it had made for the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the biggest contemporary art show in South Asia. The poster showed a colourful boat and fishermen.