By Tourism India
Ask Riaz Ahamed, Past President of the Kerala Travel Mart Society and Managing Director of Abad Hotels & Resorts, what KTM fundamentally is, and he doesn’t reach for the language of exhibitions or trade fairs. He reaches for ownership. “KTM is an event conducted by private entrepreneurs with the support of the government,” he says. “Except for providing financial and moral support, the rest of it is done by the stakeholders.” It’s a distinction that matters, because it explains why, twenty-five years after its founding in 2000 as India’s first single-state travel mart, KTM has grown into something considerably larger than the platform it originally set out to be -“an umbrella body,” as Ahamed puts it, “representing the entire tourism sector of Kerala.”
That evolution – from mart organiser to sector-wide institution -didn’t happen by government mandate. It happened, Ahamed argues, because Kerala’s tourism trade arrived at a shared realisation early on. “There is a realisation among the Kerala Tourism players that despite competition, it is imperative to work together to promote the destination,” he says. The Tourism Department’s proactive backing gave that instinct room to grow, but the will to cooperate – hoteliers, homestay owners, Ayurveda centres, and tour operators setting aside their day-to-day rivalry for a shared platform -came from within the industry itself. It is, in Ahamed’s telling, the real secret sauce behind KTM’s public-private partnership: not a formula imposed from outside, but a working consensus the trade chose to maintain.
Carrying Kerala’s Name Abroad
Under Ahamed’s leadership and that of his fellow past presidents, KTM’s ambitions moved well beyond Kochi. The mart was actively promoted at travel exhibitions across India and internationally, and the Tourism Department went a step further – entrusting KTM with conducting dedicated trade shows in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, key Gulf markets with deep, long-standing ties to Kerala. Government funding to subsidise foreign buyers’ travel expenses made the proposition even more compelling for international trade partners weighing which Indian destination to prioritise. It was this combination -presence in new markets, and financial support that lowered the barrier for genuine buyers to attend -that Ahamed credits as one of the standout milestones of his tenure.
That buyer strategy, in fact, runs through nearly every answer Ahamed gives about KTM’s success. Selecting the right buyers based on genuine market potential, and backing that selection with both travel subsidy and hosted-buyer status, is what he identifies as the mechanism that turned Kerala from what outsiders once saw as a quiet backwater into a globally recognised eco-cultural brand. It wasn’t marketing spend alone that built “God’s Own Country” as an international proposition -it was getting the right people, with the right intent to do business, physically into the state.
A Platform Built for the Smallest Players
Ahamed is equally clear about what makes KTM structurally different from generic multi-country trade shows. “KTM has played a pivotal role in promoting tourism in Kerala by providing a platform for small players who would not otherwise have the resources to display their products in international marts,” he says. A homestay in Wayanad or an artisan cooperative in Malabar simply cannot afford a stall at ITB Berlin or WTM London – but at KTM, held once every two years, they stand in the same hall as Kerala’s largest resort chains. That biennial rhythm, Ahamed notes, also works in the trade’s favour: it gives enough time between editions for genuinely new products and developments to be worth exhibiting, rather than repeating the same pitch year after year.
The single-state format itself, he argues, is KTM’s sharpest competitive edge. “Here, the buyer who is interested in promoting our state is quite sure of what is in store,” he says – a clarity of purpose that benefits sellers and buyers alike, since neither side wastes time sifting through destinations they were never going to book.
Resilience Through Crisis
KTM’s institutional character was tested hardest, in Ahamed’s account, by the pandemic and by Kerala’s recurring floods. “Whenever we faced a pandemic or natural calamities, KTM never backed out,” he says, pointing to the Society’s pivot to a Virtual Mart shortly after COVID-19 struck -built on software developed specifically for that purpose – and to KTM’s decision to go ahead with the physical mart immediately after the floods, precisely to restore buyer confidence when the state needed it most.
Looking to KTM 2026 and Beyond
On what comes next, Ahamed’s advice to incoming leadership is grounded rather than aspirational. KTM’s digital backbone – buyer registration, appointment scheduling, and online stall booking – is already in place and was proven out during the pandemic; the task now is simply to keep pace as the technology around it evolves. His deeper message, though, is about mandate. “The focus of KTM should always revolve around promoting Keralam as a sustainable tourism destination,” he says, while also urging the Society to keep mentoring new entrepreneurs and standalone operators through seminars and meetings – and to keep functioning as the trade’s collective voice to government. Twenty-five years in, Ahamed’s closing thought is less a farewell than a reminder: KTM’s strength was never really about the mart. It was, and remains, about the industry that chose to build it together.
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