Akshay Kumar – Mumbai
Enterprising Travel Agents Association (ETAA) is all set to expand footprint in eastern India with a new chapter in Kolkata. During the 17th annual general meeting, ETAA constituted two new committees namely tourism and hotel committee. ETAA is also planning to introduce an airline committee which is still under pipeline. Carl Vaz, chairman, Charson Advisory will be heading the tourism committee, while Geoff Magee, vice president- operations, The Ambassador Group will be heading the hotels division.
Speaking about the new development, Jagat Mehta, president, ETAA said, “We have formed these committees to simplify our structure and this will help our members in the long term. The committee heads are industry stalwarts who can take us a long way. The main focus of ETAA is educating our members. In the past we have done various educational programmes for our members which has turned out to be fruitful.”
Recently, ETAA organised several knowledge sessions addressing issues like service tax, cyber crime and also product knowledge sessions in association with Trawelltag, etc. “Earlier, we conducted four sessions with Trawelltag and also many other sessions in all our chapters. Our goal is to educate our members. On October 24, 2015 we will be hosting a corporate training programme on employee engagement. We will ensure that we organise such sessions quarterly in each of our chapters,” explained Mehta.
Speaking about challenges, Mehta added, “As of today, the only challenge which we see is competition with the online players. We have created ETAA as a platform to address these challenges and find out the way forward.”