TravTalk India Online Magazine
For Manish Kriplani, MD, Baywatch Travels, life has not been a cakewalk, but he has ensured that his and his family’s dreams come true. His mother has been his hero and her blessings have got him so far.
A luxury travel expert, Manish Kriplani hasn’t had it easy. At 17, he lost his father who used to have a retail garment store. “It was in 1987, and I had just entered college. My grandfather was very old and we didn’t know what happened to the store. We were almost zero at that point of time. My mother wanted me to finish college. Once I passed out of college, I left the next day for Indonesia and started working for an export company. To support the family, my mother started working for Raj Travels and got paid ₹3000.”
However, Kriplani had to return to Chennai after his grandfather passed away. “My grandmother and mother were alone with my brother, who is 11 years younger than me. It was 1993 when I came back and started working for an export company and supporting my family along with my mother. However, I changed jobs every month and worked for many companies but couldn’t adjust after working in Indonesia. Finally, I told my mom that I wanted to do something on my own. At that time, my mom had left Raj Travels and was working elsewhere. Since she had some experience of the travel industry, and we did not know what to do, we started doing ticketing with another partner as that business was very glamorous at the time. With no calculations, planning and thinking we started the company in the middle of the city with only the two of us. Later, we started hiring people one-by-one and had a team of two to three more people.”
It was around the same time that Kriplani got married. lnterestingly, he first met his wife, Reshma, while he was in Indonesia, and realised later that she was his neighbour at the time.
“However, we lost touch for five years after I came back to India. As luck would have it, she came back into my life all of a sudden. She called me to say that she was coming to Chennai for a site inspection on behalf of her company—Sterling Holidays. With only a week in hand, she came and happened to miss her flight back. At that time, Air India had a once-a-week flight from Chennai to Jakarta. However, she never went back. She met my mom and then her parents came and eventually we got married in 1996,” shares Kriplani.
However, things took a turn for the worse and they suffered a huge loss after a company bought tickets in bulk from them and disappeared overnight. “Everything we invested in was wiped out in one shot, and my partners didn’t want to continue and wanted their money back. We gave back everything and it was only us after that. We started all over again, and fortunately things started looking up and we got into tours and packages. I started travelling and my first Fam tour was in 1999 to Australia. And Australia has been my ace card until today. Anybody wanting to go to Australia would come to my office and wouldn’t go anywhere else. We also started doing New Zealand and other countries and started appointing more people. My wife also joined the business and was taking care of the inbound part, I was doing outbound, while my mom was heading everything. At one point we had up to 20 people working for us, and it’s been going on well. We are still doing the same thing, but in a different way. Instead of doing just hard work, we are doing smart work and create luxury holidays for people,” claims Kriplani.
He also dabbled in imported furniture business for five years. “In 1999, a lot of people form Malaysia used to come and buy tickets from us. At that time, I made friends with people who used to export very good furniture to India. One of them convinced me to open a furniture shop here. In 1991, I was the only one to have imported furniture in Chennai where I used to import furniture from Malaysia, Singapore and even from China and Italy. We did very well till 2004, after which many other people started doing the same business, and since the margin reduced, we wrapped up the business. We have only been dedicatedly doing travel business, as that’s what I know best,” he shares. He has two daughters and spends much of his free time at the gym since he is a fitness freak. Apart from that he loves listening to music. He has also done rowing for several years.
“I have also done other adventure sports including sky-diving, bungee jumping and shark-cage diving,” he adds. Kriplani was declared DDP Game Changer at South India Travel Awards 2019.
