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Pricol Travel, through its wholly-owned subsidiary Advantage Asia Travel Partnership, is offering empowerment programmes for the holiday and leisure travel agencies in India. The consortium has in the last six months partnered with 15 travel agents.
“We will be on-boarding 26 more by March 2019 to reach a total of 40 agencies,” said Vikram Mohan, Chairman, Pricol Travel Ltd.
“These are hard times for small and mid-sized travel agencies with potential travellers not short of options when it comes to researching and arranging their trips. With online portals, more deals and service offerings, travel service companies need to offer something more insightful than the generic information that can be found all over the Net,” Mohan said. They also have to acquire technological tools and automate their services end-to-end. Small sized travel agencies obviously cannot invest huge sums on technology.
To help small and mid-sized agencies in tier-II and III locations, Advantage Asia Travel Partnership (AATP) will share collective knowledge with member partners to deliver exceptional travel services.
“Agencies would have to pay a subscription fee to become a member of this network,” Mohan said and pointed out that the company was looking to on-board the agents with an average annual sales of ₹6.5 crore and with potential to grow it to ₹10 crore.
“We will be limiting it to two agencies in tier II cities and one from a tier-III town. We will cover 60 towns and cities across the country by 2021,” he added.
Global network
The agencies will be offered training in operations management, marketing, set up a strong partnership network, business management and networking opportunities. “They will have access to global network as AATP is part of a global network – Advantage Travel Partnership UK, with 300 partners in the UK. “We have taken the lead for Asia,” he said.
According to Mohan, Asia will be the next growth engine as people were taking to leisure travel in a big way.
A Dharmaraj, Chief Operating Officer, AATP, said the company would be associated with over a hundred agencies in three years.
The investment in this initiative is estimated at around ₹7 crore till date.
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