TravTalk India Online Magazine
Backed by substantial funding, travel technology start-up Tourwiz is not only looking at offering agencies complete back-end support with their SaaS-based products, but also aims at building an online marketplace for the trade on its platform by taking care of their back office requirements.
Hazel Jain
TourWiz provides travel professionals with all the digital tools and content they need to work more efficiently and grow their business in the post-pandemic world. Swapnil Shaha, CEO of Tourwiz, explains the concept behind the start-up. He says, “Tourwiz was launched for all the smaller travel agents, taking care of all their back-office needs and providing them with an office on-the-go. We offer back-end solutions, starting from creating leads, sending itineraries and quotations to clients, invoicing, and recording this for their financial analysis. This includes revenue and sales reports. With this product, we want to help them so that they can focus on marketing while we support them in operations. ”
TourWiz is a joint venture between TravelCarma, a global travel technology brand, and Monarch Networth Capital, a financial services company in India. It is relevant for leisure travel agencies, home-based agencies, outbound operators, DMCs, and inbound operators. It is a user-friendly, SaaS-based product, and it comes with a subscription. “In essence, agencies get a readymade product from us. We are continuously adding features to it based on their feedback. Moreover, each of the tour operators can avail of our Partner With Us programme. Here, they can start putting in their special deals and promotions for all our subscriber agents to see and promote them to their own clients. In essence, we are building a community for the travel trade on our platform where the travel agent can come and place a request and benefit from our wide network of tour operators, our partners, and other travel agents, ” Shaha adds.
The product is now on trial and the subscription will start on January 1, 2022. Shaha reveals, “We have a monthly, quarterly, six-monthly, and yearly plan for subscriptions. The monthly fee will be Rs. 625 plus GST.We have kept it very affordable. And as soon as they get rewards points, and if they are able to stretch those rewards points to this value, they can use the system for free! ” It is now moving to launch in the northern and eastern states of India, so by the end of December, it will have covered the entire country.
Sharing the technology side of the product, Saurabh Mehta, Co-Founder, Tourwiz, says, “As of date, we have 5,000 subscribers on our platform. So we don’t sell anything on our platform. Our partners directly connect with the agencies. These partners can be hoteliers, or tour operators. Our focus is on subscriptions and bringing them together. So it is like a marketplace. And since this is a SaaS-based model, customisations and upgrades are completely free. We will take ideas from our customers and incorporate them.”
He reveals that the team is now working on multiple templates. So, if a client grows tired of one template, they can change it while the content remains the same.So during Diwali, you can have one template, and another one for Holi. Clients get pretty excited about it. The product is completely mobile friendly and can be operated off of any device. Right now, we are trying to automate the entire accounting process. This is especially helpful for smaller agencies, ” Mehta says. The content includes over 600 airlines, 135K hotels, 400K activities, and 10K transfers.
Shaha adds, “We are looking at reaching out to the trade through all the national travel associations such as TAAI and TAFI, ETAA UTEN – all of them. We have already started talking to them and tried to become their Allied members since booking isn’t part of our business today, and we are not an IATA organization.
