Offering the best of both worlds

Amidst the several hotels, resorts, serviced residences and homestays mushrooming across the country, Earthaa Escapes comes as a breath of fresh air. Founded by Sehar Shamim along with Sanjay Wadhawan and US Jamwal, Earthaa has already opened its first homestay, in Mashobra.

Nisha Verma

For Sehar Shamim, the Earthaa Escapes brand is an amalgamation of a luxury hotel and a private homestay. “Earthaa is a luxury homestay start-up creating curated experiences for the discerning traveller. The brand is being positioned to fill a gap in the market. Travellers had to earlier choose from a fully serviced hotel or a non-serviced homestay, wherein they had to buy groceries, cook food and clean after themselves, thereby taking away valuable family time during their breaks. Earthaa intends to fill this void by providing fully serviced homestays for the traveller who wants to sit back and enjoy their holiday. Earthaa provides the service of a luxury hotel with the privacy and space of a homestay,” she says.

The company’s flagship property, Aranya, at Mashobra, has seen great response within a couple of months of its launch and is running at 100% occupancy. However, expansion is on cards. “We plan to bring 20 homes under our umbrella this financial year, and reach a milestone of 50 homes in two years. We will be focusing a lot on our operational excellence within each home. Currently, we are looking at many locations, including Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Goa to begin with,” Shamim shares.

For sales, they are reaching the consumers through different channels and will also launch their own website enabled with a booking engine. “We are actively using the OTAs and offline agents who deal with the luxury segment. We are also launching our website in July complete with a booking engine and payment gateway integration. The website also has a separate section for homeowners for them to view the bookings status in their respective homes,” she informs. For promotions of Earthaa, they are aggressively marketing through their own network, social media, travel agents and OTAs. “Soon our website will be live, and we will be using that also for pushing our marketing and promotional strategies,” adds Shamim.

She believes that experiences like Earthaa would change how travel is perceived in India. “Earthaa is poised to bring a steep change in the experiential holiday market through its curated experiences in luxury, fully serviced homestays. The discerning traveller is ready for this change,” she says.