Our home grown tour operators are our brand samurais | Neil Patil, Founder & Director, VeenaWorld

Primary motivator to pursue your professional goals in the travel and tourism sector? At Veena World, we truly believe that travel makes you celebrate life. It broadens your perspective, exposes you to different cultures, and together turns you into a better human being. We have been witness to stories that have been shared by our guests time and again and if you see the feedback we receive on a daily basis, its not just ratings on a point-scale. Our guests actually write stories, poems, extensive travelogues and create exceptional audio visual content about their holidays and experience with us. At the end of the day, reading or being witness to these stories is what gives you the energy to spread this excitement and happiness to many more people around the country. An observation you have made about the industry, either a challenge or an opportunity? Having spent a little more than 5 years in the industry, I personally see the industry becoming more competitive and more service oriented. Newer direct and indirect players are coming in, competition is increasing, guest expectations are increasing. I have often said this, and reiterate, that in such a competitive environment, travel agents all across are left with no alternative but to stand out by providing the highest quality of service at an affordable price. At our company, we pride ourselves in ensuring that our guests enjoy the highest levels of comfort while on holiday through the continuous training of our brand samurais, that is our home-grown Tour Managers. At the same time, picking up the right talent is extremely essential and our goal for the next 5 years as a company is to further strengthen the core of our company, that is our 1000 strong team! Vision for the business? As I mentioned earlier, looking into the future, we operate with a simple principle, that is to provide incredible holiday experiences to celebrate life. Now to achieve this, we are currently paving the way towards developing an empowering culture internally that inspires team members all over to personally strive for higher levels of achievement & growth. Now this is only possible if all of us, that is all of the Veena World team, together believe that ‘We are in this together! We move forward together! We grow together!’. Technology has been a substantial game changer. Comment. Technology and all of the advancements that we’ve seen over the last couple of years, have definitely aided in reshaping the entire customer journey. At Veena World, we are making necessary and calculated investments in a number of things including ChatBots, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Machine Learning and more, so as to craft a better experience for our end consumer. ChatBots to automate internal processes & improve the booking experience, artificial intelligence and machine learning to build better predictive models to aid business strategy, data analytics to optimise costs, audio visual aids to create consistent training & learning avenues for the team, are just a few of the things that we are currently experimenting with and are optimistic that these will reap great dividends moving forward. I honestly believe that in our country, a hybrid model consisting of both technological innovations and personal service of the highest quality, will go a long way in determining how sustainable your business is in the long run. Gen Nxt thought? I operate with one principle, ‘don’t think that you always know everything!’. It is your team, the people you work with day in day out, who together ensure that the business continues to run in the long term. It is only when you are grounded in thought and show respect and appreciation towards the opinions of your team, that you will be able to deliver results that are in sync with your long term goals. ]]>