Mysuru Fest and long weekend draw tourists in droves to Heritage City

Over the long weekend followed by Republic day on Friday, tourists thronged the three-day Mysuru Fest, packed with Chithra Santhe, Food Fest, Flea Market and 'Sanskrithika Vaibhava'-cultural evenings. Receiving a good response, the fest concluded on Sunday.

'Visit_Mysuru' Instagram page of tourism department crossed 15 lakh viewers as people visited the page to know more about the fest. More than 10,000 people visited the fest per day on all three days, at Manasagangothri campus, according to Tourism Department Joint Director, M K Savitha.

"Though the fest was organised for the first time, we have received the expected footfall. We expect to pull more crowd for such tourism events in the coming days. We plan to consult tourism stakeholders and come up with a tourism calendar with a list of events planned every month round the year, so that tourists can plan and come in large numbers to Mysuru," Savitha said.

According to Mysuru Palace Board Deputy Director T S Subramanya, Mysuru Palace alone saw 18,037 visitors on Friday and 22,937 visitors on Saturday. Last weekend on January 20 (Saturday), there were 10,710 visitors and on January 21 (Sunday) 12,302 visitors to the Palace.

Mysuru Hotel Owners' Association head C Narayana Gowda said, "While there are 10,500 rooms in 425 hotels in Mysuru, there was 100 per cent occupancy from December 23 to December 31. After that the occupancy had dropped to 50 per cent during week days and 80 to 90 per cent during the week ends. Now due to the long weekend and Mysuru Fest, all the hotel rooms in Mysuru were 100 per cent occupied from Friday to Sunday. More than 50 per cent of the tourists to the city were from other States including Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala".

"The tourists inflow increased by 10 per cent due to Mysuru Fest. A large number of people visited the fest due to good publicity on social media. Since it was organised for the first time 90 per cent of the visitors to Fest were locals. But if the calendar of events is released we can pull more tourists to Mysuru from other places," he said.

Mysuru Fest not just promoted brand Mysuru products like Mysuru silk, Mysuru sandal soap, Mysuru pak, but also GI products of other parts of the country like Kantha work products of Shanthinikethan. It also provided a platform to artists like Hemashekar, who received the national award twice for her Batik work from the President of India, and also demonstration and sale of various art forms. Besides giving a good shopping experience and enjoyable delicacies, the event helped women of self help groups, start ups, food vendors, small scale entrepreneurs too as they made good business. The 'Sanskrithika Vaibhava' also drew a good response, at the Open Air Theatre.

On Sunday too, a large number of people queued up to get their portraits sketched, kids thronged to get tattoos at Chithra Santhe. Hiremagaluru Kannan, Prof M Krishnegowda, Mimicri Dayanand, Indumathi Salimat, Malleshgowda, Nagashri Thyagaraj, Y V Gundu Rao and others presented a humour fest on Sunday evening.

The crowd was enthralled by a live concert by Santhosh Venki, who has sung over 3,000 songs. The Georgian team kept the audience spellbound with their performance as well.