From Pillar to Post, to Infinity…
There’s often confusion between what a travel consultancy does and how it differs from a travel agency. Mr Harsh Sonawala, founder of leading travel consultancy IndiaSomeday, revealed what happens behind the curtains. While travel agencies simply fulfil the formalities, a travel consultancy personalises your experience, ensuring that memories from each trip last a lifetime. From learning about each client to tailoring holiday plans, each execution aspect is carefully looked after at Mr Sonawala’s consultancy.
Spurred by personal love for travel in India, Mr Sonawala planned trips for all his friends across the country. To this end, he realised the grand scope for business in the field of personalised travel and founded his travel consultancy ‘India Someday’.
While he initially commenced working on Excel sheets, his modern-day setup is laden with technology and personally-developed software automation that facilitates coordination, bookings, and much more to increase communicative convenience between travellers and service providers, like hotels and drivers. His ‘match-making’ software is nothing short of a ‘Tinder for Travel.’ It sources people’s profiles and personalities and links them to plausible options – from which it is further modified based on a client’s requirements. Mr Sonawala’s office efficiently operates in smaller teams dedicated to each step in the travel process, ensuring smooth planning of the sequence of events and aspects related to a trip!
There’s no one-size-fits-all formula in the travel consultancy domain, so creativity and uniqueness are of the essence! Every voyager wants something new, something personal to them from each trip. An Indian audience, for example, is generally more interested in enjoying a luxurious stay at a boutique hotel or exploring exotic, unheard-of regions in the country. In contrast, a foreign audience would usually be more receptive to an “authentic” Indian stay, exploring local life and enjoying touring the city.
They also differ from a travel agency in that they don’t believe in forcing everyone to don the same gloves; i.e. they don’t want all members of a group, for example, to “have to” visit all tourist joints in sight-seeing or stay locked up in a resort. The beauty of travel lies in following your heart and your desires!
Covid-19 drastically shook the travel industry. International travel was restricted for almost the entirety of the pandemic, so Indians especially were forced to look back and marvel (and respect) the beauties in India itself. However, due to lockdowns and in-city movement too, travel became more hotel/resort-oriented than destination-oriented, which proved challenging to Mr Sonawala’s company – since their expertise lies in really displaying the soul of a city in a matter of days. However, what wasn’t as pleasant was the 3-trillion dollar loss faced by the global travel industry.
The only way to survive such a dramatic drop in business is to have managed finances very prudently and saved enough for a rainy day; well, in this case, a thunderous two years. While most vendors hibernated, countless businesses were shut down throughout incessant stressful seasons without tourism or employment.
Mr Sonawala’s company, famous for ingenuity anyways, left no stone unturned in sourcing new opportunities. With a strong network on the ground and numerous foreign and Indian contacts, they also entered the line of organic food – organising, collecting, and supplying organic products to the west, such as shipping fresh cardamom from Kerala to the UK, and more. Diversification and divergence are both essential to survive in the industry.
The travel industry is set to make a comeback, speculates Mr Sonawala. The number of people ‘revenge-travelling’ has shot up drastically, and people are unperturbed and undaunted by new variants like Delta or Omicron. “They’re so sick of staying home that, come hail or storm, you’ll find people travelling.
Come March, Mr Sonawala is also launching a new platform via his consultancy: a product for travel influencers. The scope for integrating innovation and technology into the travel industry is massive, and it is hardly being equipped right now. While it is a complicated process, Mr Sonawala is confident that when the time comes, the integration of technological travel will be revolutionary! Travel is already on the rise, and we’re optimistic that the travel industry will bounce back to all its glory in a matter of mere months!
