Tertiary cities offer huge opportunity

Speaking on the sidelines of one of the most awaited events in India – Global Panorama Showcase – Harmandeep Singh Anand, Managing Director, Jagsons Travels, discusses new products and services offered by his company, and the immense opportunity that secondary and tertiary cities have to offer.

TT Bureau

Harmandeep Singh Anand, Managing Director, Jagsons Travels, highlights some of the key products and services that his Nagpur-based travel organisation has to offer. “We have started a lot of ancillary services that we have been promoting. We are one of the top-performing PSAs for Cordelia Cruises in India. We have managed to integrate various cruiseliners in India like Costa Cruises, NCL, MSC Cruises, and Holland America within our system wherein the agents can log in and make the reservations instantly online as we have API connections with a lot of these organisations,” he said.

Apart from this, Jagsons Travels has integrated Next Cellular in their system, which offers international global SIM cards for 50 countries within minutes. “These SIM cards can be delivered anywhere across India without any cost to the consumer. If they have an e-SIM facility, this can be issued within a minute. They just need to have three documents: passport, visa, and e-ticket. Prices range from the lowest $449 going worldwide up to $4199 inclusive of GST. There is also a free SIM where one can avail 30 minutes of WhatsApp chat and incoming for free,” he added.

Jagsons also offers visa services. “We have tied up with Atlys for e-visa services for more than 30-odd countries. We offer doorstep visas through VFS at various locations. We have camps almost every week and we can manage USA, UK, and Schengen countries. These are some of the highlights of our offerings. We have NDC carriers on our system and we have integrated more than 23 airlines and we are able to offer NDC fares to the agents through the system,” Anand shares.

Developing tier II and III cities

Anand has seen the landscape evolve the years. He reminisces, “When we look at 2007-2008, tier II and III cities had not developed yet. So, we realised that there was an opportunity there. At Jagsons, we started Global Panorama Showcase in 2013, which is now developed into a full-blown event covering more than 14 cities in India. The secondary and tertiary markets have grown drastically. The growth has been multifold. Every city that IndiGo flies to they tend to create more opportunity for the industry. And that has helped us also grow.”

New travel trends

Anand believes there is a huge opportunity in cruise tourism in India. “Cordelia Cruises has been here for a while and now Costa Cruises has also started some sailings in Indian waters. Apart from that, we are also in position to market international destinations, especially with a lot of airports coming up in smaller cities like Nagpur. This is especially true for the younger travellers,” Anand says.

Jagsons’ vision has always been to educate and empower the travel industry. “That is what our motto and goal of GPS has also been. We have grown with our partners over the years,” he says.

Global Panorama Showcase

This year, GPS has crisper format. “We have table-top meetings as usual, and removed plastic altogether; it’s a completely sustainable platform. We have created a marketplace within the GPS app whereby you can have GPS Connect through the web system. So, exhibitors who are participating at our events can register. They have an access where they can upload an empty number of the information onto the system whereby buyers can have. It’s similar to any of the social media platforms.  So, you can connect with the buyers and the sellers through our platform. We plan to have some sort of an education discussion forum every fortnight within the platform,” he says.

He expects close to about 8,000 to 10,000 buyers to be registered by the end of the year with 50-odd exhibitors at each of our events. This year started with Ahmedabad and added Jaipur and Guwahati this year. These are the two new cities that have been added this year. “So, we will have about 10 cities every year whether you join in from January to December or April to March.” Anand adds.