ANNOUNCEMENTS
Safety and accessibility at the tourist destinations gained importance globally due to increasing safety issues and accessibility challenges. World tourism organization come up with set of guidelines and indicators to improve the tourism industry. Developing countries like India are also facing challenges to provide accessible infrastructure at the tourist destinations. This study attempted to audit 10 tourist places in Delhi includes UNESCO identified historical sites, religious places and markets with a set of safety and accessibility parameters based on the literature review and guidelines by the Ministry of tourism, GOI. A set of questionnaires are prepared based on the parameters to audit the different locations like Outside, at the parking, at the ticket counter, at the gate entry and inside the tourist places in google forms and linked to Safetipin applications.
In this Study MySafetiPin and SafetiPin Site applications are used to audit the tourist place and the same has been done in the pilot survey to test the flow of data collection. Due to circumstances the entire study done on the basis of secondary data is collected through safetipin organization for safety parameters and tourist places are audited through virtual tours, Google map street views and youtube videos for accessibility parameters. Key findings are some tourist places like Qutub Minar, Red fort, Bangla sahib Gurudwara, Purana Qila, Lotus temple, Jantar mantar, Dilli Haat INA are equipped with accessible infrastructure and safe to visit. Tourist place like Tughlakabad fort is not safe to access due to lack of accessible infrastructure and lack of security surveillance inside. This study can be further used to develop a holistic approach to auditing of tourist places and the development of comprehensive plans and tool kits to assist planners and policy makers in setting benchmarks and measure compliance to the benchmarks.
Key words: Safety, accessibility, tourist attractions, Infrastructure auditing
