Strategic Pause : Travel Business Readiness: Sachin Bansal, Founder and Chief Explorer, India City Walks

Reassurance of leveraging sustainable future through tourism-based businesses will face new vulnerabilities. The recovery planning has an entire new way of managing customers and creating new products. This onward opportunity is a competitive one with several new dimensions, followed by a new reality and a new normal. In present times, the earth emerges to be a start-up and we become the incubators.

The leisure full future will be different, and the tourism products will require to be developed, based on travellers’ profile and the vibrancy to impact any destination. The product & service packaging will consolidate the previously developed ones, accepting to the visual reality as innate and inevitable. The scenarios will not be same and trusting one’s own instinct to book travel will drive the prices. The suggestive itineraries from the intermediaries will be marginalised by the tourism value chain and its economies of scale.

The travel business and service providers will only thrive if they strategically innovate. The digital content of the old world (before corona) will be redundant due to changes in policy and restrictions for mitigating risks associated with COVID 19. The traditional way of selling travel will be irrelevant in the times of cautious optimism.

The issues for future in travel will be different and will revolve around clean, green and impact bookings, which will have a strict monitoring on the feedback reports filled by the travellers. The packaging of itineraries can have exposure percentage of humans travelling to a destination and threat imageries like on cigarette packs will replace glamorous imageries for sensitization standpoint. Where does this all lead for travel business? Owning the product will be an important factor for survival and the product management will offer new layers of protection, showcase and delivery in approach for making travellers’ visits and gaining a rewarding experience. The responsible tourism will get activated by travel businesses when they start making money. This awareness on responsible tourism will be a direct portfolio managed by bloggers, activists and many other like-minds of the industry.

The business mindset to sell travel will be driven by an explorer attitude or mindset, where the curiosity drives the exploration. The experience becomes the document for a modern-day business to survive by following the process, but chances of failure may be high. The predictable scenarios will be organic, and environment will bring unforeseen challenges. The famous lines- what happens in Vegas remain in Vegas will not hold true in future. What happens in Vegas will be known through border based medical check requirements for disease check-up and digital reporting security reports can pull-up schedules on the time spent on indulgences through human implant networking; only to manage the unforeseen reasons to quarantine.

The bargaining will be replaced by the joint outcome methodology and distribution of products will depend on the sustainable revenue lines within and beyond the tourism and hospitality industry. The product will be relayed back to the flag bearer for the testifying originality. The mediators who will drive the purchase will have to be in celebratory moods and aesthetically mindful for securing the purchase over one video call. The diversity will enhance the exposure to sell and that selling has to be backed by talent and innovation. Experiential travel mandates will be based on solo encounters and shall carry an evolving pattern on which discourses will be made available through marketing. Funds on social impact will bring an opportunity by creating a money funnel for access and exploration, leading to new product development. The results provided on search engines will define fairness, authenticity as keywords for the responsible consumer to learn more about the company selling the products and the fairness in trade.

The marketing will be dependent on brand security as after the pandemic due to corona virus the word globalization will be replaced by COVID-19 free. The product launch will depend on responsible behaviour benchmark of the travel business leading to consumption disciplines maintained by the future consumers. The increasing competition will give innovation a lead with strategies determined to change the travel indulgence and customer acquisitions. The traveller experience will define the consumption patterns and travel will be no more suggestive but will hold scientific ways to manage contingencies with expectations. The distribution network will entice traveller communities, retain regular visitors and create propositions around consumption. This will elevate the new world travellers to mitigate risks during planet discovery and consume and act with respect to the determined values proposed by travel business. The ultimate aim will be to create balance between the environmental, economic and social dimensions. This will be a superior challenge to be faced by travel companies while longing for sustainability of business.

The approach towards globalisation will be limited to destinations visited and promises made by the travel businesses to the travellers. The tourism product bought by the traveller will hold value in currency for travellers to remember and disseminate. The sensory feelings will be kept real rather digitised for new world experience economy. Straight from the vision of a future, the newer generation will gradually phase in sensory purchases, done through implants and motion sensors. The current augmented reality will be phased out with customised hyper loops of virtual explorations capitalised with free access passes. At the end of value chain, it will be the product that will rule the customer acquisitions to drive productivity.

The experiences by humans will be consumed digitally and only experiential innovation will drive the upwards financial trend of tourism spent. The virtual understanding through pictures, which the traveller can see will be treated as inventory. The inventory will never be able to compete with innovation and this is where the opportunity for long term growth and sustainability will clear roles. The consumption patterns will drive boundless curiosity among the travel trade as the products will be defined by intellectual properties and before accessing the product the licence fees will be paid. This will bring a trend to curb significant expansion for aggregated businesses and intermediaries who were just releasing the products on white label formats.

The travel companies should think on the lines of fast-moving consumer goods brands and make the investments in adopting technologies aligned with traveller’s purchase behaviours and emotional understandings. The travel businesses have to employ teams based on futuristic competitiveness but to know future the top management will require visionaries. The enterprise attitudes and behaviour will flow from top to bottom and when the flow is directed on digital formats like video call the intensity of the persuasiveness has to be enhanced by creating team engagement and distance checkers.

This is the strategic pause: the teams across and within travel companies have to spend time on thinking, reflecting and learning and anticipate Experiential Delivery in Tourism EDiT. The prevailing mission statement will suggest staying humble, focused, assertive and nimble. When visitors are demanding more individual and authentic experiences the teams have to make choices, fast, based on intuitive thinking, while being slow based on rationality.

The travel businesses will suffer due to their fast and unprecedented expansion by adopting newer trends with the changed scenario. The advancement of technology will lead moral sensibility giving way to price sensitivity based on deeper connections with the destinations, but this will last for short while as all ancillary incomes through commissions and margin making practices will get diminished in the area of digital unification. As quoted by Winston Churchill, “The farther backward you look, the farther forward you can see,”. The before corona perspectives will enable businesses to bring a fresh perspective to their portfolio. Are we ready to adapt?

(Dr. Sachin Bansal, is the Founder and Chief Explorer of a national tourism award winning brand ‘India City Walks’. With two decades of experience, he has multiple flagships such as India Food Trails, India Heritage Walks, India With Locals functional in the arena of community impact and destination product creation within tourism industry. He has coined the conceptual acronym (Experiential Delivery in Tourism EDiT) as the new way of revival in the post COVID 19 tourism world.)

You can reach Dr. Sachin Bansal on info@indiacitywalks.com