BHUBANESWAR: From close to 50 in 2017 to over 350 now, the state has witnessed a significant rise in properties being listed as homestays. The experience of local culture - an integral part of homestays - is missing, though.
With discerning travellers looking for homely and less expensive travel experiences, many house owners seeking a lucrative income source are now listing their properties as homestays on online travel aggregators such as Airbnb, MakeMyTrip, Booking or even social media platforms like Instagram.
Airbnb alone has listed 270 properties including villas, apartments, farm stays, flats, palaces and houses across Odisha as homestays with prices ranging from Rs 1,300 to Rs 17,000 per night. As far as booking trends go, while places like Kerala, Mumbai, Uttrakhand, Bengaluru, Goa are still favourite among domestic travellers on Airbnb, Puri has recently emerged as a top choice for homestay bookings on the platform.
However, what raises a concern is that only a handful of them are being approved in the homestay category by the government and the rest run the facilities as bed and breakfast establishments in the guise of homestays. For instance, the National Integrated Database of Hospitality Industry (NIDHI+) of the Ministry of Tourism has approved less than 20 properties as homestays in Odisha. Homestays of India, a popular social enterprise dedicated to supporting authentic family run homestays across India, approved only seven properties in the state as homestays.
The push for listing out homestays has come after the state government in 2021 began an ‘Odisha Homestay Establishment Scheme’ to bridge the demand-supply gap and encourage homeowners to host tourists and provide experiential tourist offerings. It assured one-time financial support to the owners for proper furnishing and addition of amenities and earmarked a budget of Rs 24.50 crore for the scheme for 2021-2026 period.
The SOPs mandated that the owner of the homestay must host the visitor, in the sense that he and/or his family members shall directly engage in providing hospitality experiences to the visitor. Besides, the rooms must be situated within the premises in which the owner and/or his family resides.
The guidelines, however, are being blatantly violated by house owners. “While the number of homestays continues to rise, just a few of them actually qualify to be termed as homestays. Only a handful owners stay with visitors or provide them an experience of local culture. People are even listing out flats and apartments as homestays which are merely cheap bed and breakfast facilities,” said Debasish Patnaik, travel expert and director of Crown. The state government, on the other hand, has been careful in choosing homestays for the two-day-long Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas scheduled from January 8 to 10.
Tourism department officials said earlier, an advertisement was called for enlistment of homestays in and around Bhubaneswar and close to 100 properties having 250 rooms were identified. The properties were put through a validation exercise and then listed on the Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas website (https://pbdindia.gov.in) for reservation by the guests,” said Tourism director Samarth Verma.