Abstract:
Goa has rapidly gained worldwide recognition as a tourist hot spot and has the distinction of being the most sought after destination, having ranked among the top ten in the Millennium year by BBC. This acted as a huge boost for tourism in Goa and the initial few years, post 2000 saw double digit growth in tourist inflow into the state. But after this initial spurt, from 2004 onwards the growth slowed down substantially with a couple of years in fact registering negative growth rates in tourist numbers. According to the tourism officials the slowdown can be attributed to several factors like, global economic meltdown and also the negative publicity garnered by Goa pertaining to issues like Safety of Women, Drugs, assault on foreign nationals, etc. In today's times of 24x7 coverage by TV news channels and print media all these negative aspects of Goa get highlighted more often than not. Two of the biggest incidents in Goa which captured the national media space were: 1) The Scarlet Keeling Murder (Feb 2008) which portrayed Goa as unsafe for women and even described it as the rape capital of India. 2) The Nigerian clash with the Goan Police (Nov 2013) portrayed Goa as a heaven for Drug Cartels. The objective of the paper is to study the impact of all this negative news flow on Brand Goa. The scope of the study is limited only to the domestic tourists who visited Goa during the month of August 2015.
