Socio Political Barrier To Tourism Marketing in South Asia

Tourism is a smokeless industry and is one of the fast growing businesses world over. The tourist flow to various countries serves as an indicator through which we can foresee a process of cultural assimilation and economic development in destination countries. Every country has something to offer to a tourist, it may be in the form of natural products like scenic spots or man made wonders like Disneyland in USA. Many of the developing countries are blessed with such a vast amount of cultural heritage, material artifacts and life styles embedded with fairs and festivals that tourism industry can serve as a great source of revenue generation. Despite the nature’s gift in abundance in countries and particularly in South Asia, the tourist traffic has remained dismally low and the region receives a minute percentile of the global traffic. This paper is an attempt to find out the reasons of this poor response world over and identify the perceived barriers of risk. The paper identifies two kinds of socio-political barriers like regionalized socio political risk and global socio-political risk responsible for poor traffic in the South Asian region. The paper also highlights various other perceived risks like health issues, economic issues and image issues found out to be responsible for poor traffic flow to the area