KOCHI : A high-level delegation led by Manjit Singh Soin, Consultant of the World Travel and Tourism Council, which is touring different tourist locales in the State to assess the tourism potential and the involvement of local communities in promoting tourism, visited Kumbalanghi on Tuesday.

The delegation was accompanied by Tourism Director B. Suman. Kumbalanghi is the first model village-tourism project in the country. "They saw different aspects of village tourism and how the local community is involved in the whole affair. The aim was to assess how far the community has benefited from tourism. The team also wanted to ascertain whether tourism is being promoted in a responsible, eco-friendly manner in the State," said Mr. Suman.

The council will also assess whether the destination is in itself attractive and the measures that are being taken to preserve the culture and heritage of the place. On Wednesday, the team will visit the Fort Kochi heritage zone and look at the heritage-conservation works, which were carried out there. They are also expected to visit Taj Malabar in Wellingdon Island and the Kerala Tourism Development Corporation-owned Bolghatty Palace Hotel. The team will then leave for Thrissur and Palakkad, where they will visit Kerala Kalamandalam, Sakthan Thampuran Palace (which won this year's national award for best restoration work done on a heritage site), the Chennamangalam synagogue, which is a symbol of tolerance and communal amity and Kalari Kovilakom, which has taken a break from the conventional concept of a hotel. On Thursday, they will visit Kovalam and a few other places in Thiruvananthapuram.

Sources in the Tourism Department said that each year, the council selects a tourist destination, which has got high potential. Kerala was among the 100 destinations world-wide which applied for the slot this year. Kerala was shortlisted along with Greece and Mexico.

Mr. Soin is also likely to meet Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and Tourism Minister K.C. Venugopal among others, in the coming days. We are leaving no stone unturned to aggressively promote tourism in Kerala, and a place in the council list is high in our agenda, they said.

On Monday, the team had toured Alappuzha, Aranmula, Thekkady and Kumarakom, among other places. They saw how the local communities had been involved in forest-conservation work at Thekkady and also how plantation tourism, which is in its infancy in Kerala, is being promoted. They interacted with the local population in all the places they had visited, to assess how far they had benefited from tourism projects in their locality.

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