TravTalk India Online Magazine
Mahesh Iyer, Executive Director & Chief Executive Officer, Thomas Cook (India), feels that a new world order has emerged and players in the industry must have an ear to the ground in order to seize every opportunity that comes along. The industry needs to ensure it has adequate avenues for customers to reach out to them.
Hazel Jain
What kind of challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
I am proud of the agility and speed displayed by my teams across Thomas Cook India – bothin reimagining our businesses and in delivering strong customer value.To better understand consumer behaviour, we conducted a survey with over 2,500 customers across India’s metros and tier cities and our ‘Holiday Readiness Travel Report – Future of Travel post COVID-19’, revealed key drivers in this new era of travel: health and safety ranks as the primary concern for 75% respondents. Our strategic focus was given to product development. We had to quickly adapt to the new normal and create products and services in line with the requirements of the COVID-19 era.
The consumer wish-list had changed and our teams worked basis the same to create easy to book, practical holidays such as workations, staycations, drivecations and affordable luxury holidays.
Your outlook for 2021?
We can expect challenges presented to us due to COVID-19 to continue in 2021 and therefore, a new mantra for 2021 will be that we continue to be nimble and flexible in all that we do. Health and safety will continue to hold focus and the customer wish-list will continue to see changes. Come 2021, we will move forward with an unerring focus on customer feedback while keeping a close watch on developing market trends.
Some of the other key elements that we will focus on include domestic travel, adding exciting product lines such as our recent river cruise packages with Antara Luxury Cruises. We will also continue to leverage technology in our outreach to the customer through our Virtual Branch and outlets. For our foreign exchange branches, too, through our unique Virtual Branch model we will continue to facilitate contactless customer servicing. We have also operationalised a Corporate and B2B Booking Tool. We aim to forge new partnerships and alliances with reputed brands to bring significant customer benefits. We also launched a B2B partnership for Indian travel agents who have been affected by the pandemic. Through this outreach that we undertook with TRAVTALK, we have created a partnership opportunity to helpthem regain consumer confidence by leveraging our health and safety programmes and range of products, services.
What lessons must the travel trade in general learn in the new world order to gain back market share?
Players must have a ear to the ground and would need to seize every opportunity basis the customer demand. The germ of the new idea needs to be quickly turned around into a tangible offering. Meaningful, strategic partnerships will continue to hold value. These would need to be actively identified and sourced.
