TravTalk India Online Magazine
Sharing broad plans for the India market, Jaal Shah, Founder of Rezlive.com and Group Managing Director, Travel Designer Group, says that tier II, III cities is where his focus lies right now and the company is keen on connecting with travel agents here in order to expand the business to business network.
Hazel Jain
Launched in 2007, Rezlive.com today has its presence across India in terms of its travel agent network. And while it is constantly connected with leading travel agencies, the focus is now also on tier II and III cities in India.
Sharing more about the company plans, Jaal Shah, Founder of Rezlive.com and Group MD, Travel Designer Group, says, “That is something we are on a constant hunt for. We want to add more agents onboard from these cities that used to be accessibly only via trade shows at one time. But now we are sending our people into these cities, for physical sales, and recruiting people in these cities, and doing events here. I am glad that some tourism bodies and trade associations have also started their networking events in these tier II and III cities cities, which gives us an opportunity to meet and interact with them. This is going to be our strategy for the next few years.”
Competitive landscape
India has become a competitive and crowded market in terms of the B2B online portals, Shah says. “What is really good about this is that most of them are home-grown Indian companies. There have been some new entrants in the market and the existing players have strengthened their position. India as a market has also evolved wherein people want to book online more, and post-COVID the search has converted to growth of lots of companies such as ours where travel agents started looking at online medium, one, as an information medium, and two, as a transaction medium,” he adds.
The traditional DMCs, which used to dominate the Indian market for some of these destinations, faced a lot of problems pre and post-COVID.
“I think the overall acceptability of the online companies and the people who believe can book via people like us has only increased the idea that it’s growing where we started taking back the shares from those DMCs and doing more transactions online. For India, two things are important for us to know because a lot of agencies have kind of reallocated themselves. We saw a complete change of real estate where people have moved geography and changed their offices. So, first to establish connect there have been a lot of changes with regard to the manpower in India because of COVID. For us, the first thing was to reach out to a maximum number of agents, re-establish and regroup on how we used to work and connect with travel agents, and at the same time we started looking at more cities to expand our reach because suddenly these Indian cities started having more flights – not only internationally but also domestically, which has opened a new market for some of these travel agents,” Shah says.
New destinations exciting
For Rezlive.com, reaching out to these travel agents via various routes was important. So, it organised its own events and started participating extensively in all roadshows, platforms and trade shows. “We started working closely with tourism boards. In fact, we just concluded a fantastic three-city roadshow of Abu Dhabi in India. This provided us with good networking opportunities to showcase Abu Dhabi to agents in India. Such activities have only been increasing and we are trying to encash and be part of these activities,” Shah says.
He also highlights that some new and interesting destinations that were unheard of in the old days in India are taking over. “Destinations like Vietnam. Today, Ahmedabad has two flights into Vietnam – into Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. Such low-cost connections have not only allowed people to travel more but made travel to such destinations more affordable. We see now that there are flights opened between north India into Georgia and that’s going to drive some tourism. We are looking at Air Asia expanding base in India. So, the outbound travel from India is constantly changing and I think it’s becoming more affordable with more options available to travellers.”
