13th May 2020

To All Members

Sub: Regarding Membership Subscription for the Financial Year 2020-21

Dear Members,

At the outset on behalf of the Executive Committee, I wish you, your family and all your team members in the office to remain in good health and stay safe.  Let us in this difficult time stay home and stay united and fight together with Covid-19 by following the advisories being issued by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India and the State Governments.

Due to lockdown since 21st March 2020, IATO Office premises was closed and staff had been working from home since then. Now with partial relaxation, IATO office is opened with skeleton staff thrice a week i.e. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to do the essential work related to finance and budgets.  However otherwise, IATO Secretariat is fully functional and working from home.

Similarly offices of most of our members remained closed since national lockdown was announced and since then we are all united in fighting the common threat to our existence - the coronavirus.

As you are aware, IATO has left no stone unturned in getting some relief from the Government and have approached, PMO, Niti Aayog, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Tourism and various state governments for survival and revival and we hope some relief would be given to the tourism industry.

We are receiving, many emails and telephone calls from the members about the renewal of their membership for the financial year 2020-21. With the present national lockdown with partial relief in some states/zones, when tourism business have come to standstill, to provide some relief to members, EC has decided to defer raising the invoice for renewal of membership till 1st July 2020. Accordingly, invoices will be raised subsequently to give relief to members in these trying times. All memberships renewed for 2019 - 2020 will continue to be valid till the time new invoices for annual subscription for financial year 2020-21 are raised.

I would like to inform the members that our yearly expenses to run the IATO Secretariat are around Rs. 1.02 crores and our collection of membership fee based on last year is approximately the same. Therefore, to meet the expenses members who wish to pay now can send us an email on email id accounts@iato.in and info@iato.inand accordingly we shall send our invoice with the bank details for the payment online.

With best wishes,

Stay Safe, Stay Healthy

Pronab Sarkar

President