KAHINI CHAKRABORTY – Mumbai
Lama Tours recently launched a new global reservation system- Lama Connect which has 800 travel agents already active on the system. Lama Connect offers nearly 70,000 hotels, about 15,000 excursion tickets, 6,000 transfer options available worldwide. The announcement of this new offering by the company was done at the recently held four-city roadshow. Kulwant Singh, managing director, Lama Tours said, “Currently we have about 800 agents who are active on the system and we are targeting to 3,000 agents by September this year. We have been selective and have become aggressive in our promotions. We are putting up our sales staff in Ahmedabad, Pune and Chandigarh. We are also increasing our manpower in Mumbai and Delhi who will inform the agents about the system. We are also looking at organising another roadshow in September this year.”
Elaborating on the reason behind launching Lama Connect, Singh added, “We started online about five-six years back and launched lama.ae and lamadubai.com. However, we were seeing that the system always had a connection that was missing between the agents and Dubai as a destination. In order to present as a global destination the best way was to come up with a brand which is more popular globally. This would also give our offices in Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar a chance to negotiate, consolidate a hotel and put them up directly onto our site. With this, the benefit can be given to markets like India as it is a huge potential market for us as well as other growing markets like China and Russia, which we are currently targeting.”
Lama Tours has seen constant growth of nearly 30-34 per cent from the Indian market. “Last year we received a growth of 34 per cent and this year we are targeting 70 per cent,” informed Singh.
