ETW Staff – Mumbai
Founded in 1992, Pearl Travels plans to tap the B2C segment in 2016. Traditionally, the company has been offering hotel rooms, airport transfers and city excursions booking facilities in Europe to the travel trade only. Jayesh Asher, managing director, Pearl Travels informed Express TravelWorld, “We plan to offer our services to the end consumer too. This will be done in a manner that protects the travel trade’s interest in our products too. It is not our intention to undercut our peers and B2B clients. However, as the India market is on the verge of expanding in a huge way it makes business sense to tap the end consumer directly too. The B2C segment will be tapped through other brands that we are developing like a holiday club, an inbound direct sell brand and high profile retail outlets offering an unique travel and leisure product buying experience to the consumer. The retail outlets will be expanded by way of a franchise programme. To support the above plans we plan to implement speed information technology platforms and a comprehensive training programme for team members and franchisees.” The inbound brand Heritage India Tours will be leveraged through extensive marketing in selected overseas markets.
Talking about the company’s core business, Asher added, “Concentrating on the B2B business only we have expanded our destinations to include Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Middle East, Far East and India(inbound and domestic). During this stage we have aimed at introducing away from the beaten path itineraries. Currently, we have more than 400 different itineraries for worldwide destinations along with unique programmes.” In 2013, the company launched its soft adventure brand called Adventure Bike Tours offering initially three itineraries covering Australia, South Africa and Oman. The company offers products for destinations like Cuba, Borneo, Zanzibar, Mozambique and Malta (to be launched soon).
When asked about the business revenue expectations in 2016, he stated, “We aim to double our sales revenue every year. However, if we are able to find the right partner to put our full expansion plan into action we expect to touch more than Rs 500 crore by 2021. We understand and appreciate that a lot of planning, hard work and cost will be involved. The benefit with Pearl Travels group is that the basic infrastructure, IT platform and domain knowledge have been developed over the last 24 years of existence.”