Offering bespoke experiences helps brands and companies enhance consumer engagement and build loyalty; thus, a strong pillar in the tourism and wedding industry.
Tamarind Global, an Indian destination management company, aims to provide services in the space of event management, corporate travel, and hospitality solutions to clients seeking distinct and memorable travel experiences.
The major chunk of Tamarind Global’s business flows in from corporate events which contributes to more than 40 per cent of the company’s revenue.
In an exclusive chat with Everything Experiential, Louis D'Souza, Director, Tamarind Global underscored the evolution of the industry in the two decades’ existence of the company, the boom in the weddings and tourism industry and more.
Edited excerpts:
With an experience of nearly two decades in the business of destination and event management, how have you seen the evolution of the industry?
Tamarind Global was born in 2006, and it was born on the cusp of a boom in the industry. Although the industry has seen ups and downs, that was just on the brink of when liberalisation, which was done by the government, was kicking in.
A lot of changes which helped the industry to grow. In the early 2000s, after we saw liberalisation and with the Government of India promoting Incredible India as a campaign, the capacity of the hotels started increasing. Then, a lot of transformations happened.
This benefit was reaped by Tamarind Global, which was focusing on inbound as well as domestic tourism. From there, we have diversified into other verticals, which is the big fat Indian wedding, putting together our corporate services team and our events team. We capitalised on what was happening in the industry and we were very agile. The diversification that we took on had very focused teams.
Growth happened in this business wherein weddings suddenly took on a new hue, and destination weddings suddenly became very popular – this was maybe around the mid-2000s. That was when we started focusing and stepped into the wedding market, this was around 2009.
Domestic destination weddings were the trend. Gradually, looking at the affordability of having an international wedding - the cost factor, the connectivity that exists etc, a lot of people also started choosing to have international weddings. That's when international weddings started picking up.
We also had Bollywood playing a very huge role in creating this aura about the Indian wedding – which meant that in terms of inspiration, Bollywood was viewed as an influencer. We saw this trend picking up both, in the domestic as well as later on in the international wedding markets.
For corporates, with liberalisation, the event industry took a huge upswing. Companies that were stepping into the market, were drawing inspiration from corporates and had begun to adopt a more professional approach. The investments that were coming in from international brands into India saw this business grow at a rapid pace. The MICE industry started taking off speedily because of these MNCs that were coming into India, which proved to be beneficial for us when we started operations in this space.
Today we are at the cusp of the next big thing. From a personal perspective, many people suffered in the pandemic and lost their loved ones during that time. It was, of course, devastating for businesses and devastating at an individual level, too. But the pandemic was a great reset for the industry – it allowed us to recalibrate and rethink our strategies.
That's what we also did at Tamarind Global. We showed great resilience by instantly adapting to these changes, incorporating health and safety measures in our planning, looking at having leaner teams, having more efficient ways of working, etc. That has now become a norm for Tamarind Global also for living in the moment.
You mentioned about tourism and weddings seeing a boom, and the Bollywood and celebrity influence gaining significance too. How do you see the wedding and tourism industries shaping up? Every company has a different perspective to look at these in terms of their USP and how they want to design these for their clients/brands that look forward to their services. So, how do you see these taking shape, specifically in the context of Tamarind Global?
Our Managing Director, Mahesh Sharodkar, puts it very succinctly on our company profile that God is in the details. And this is a mantra that we live by, wherein we always focus on the objectives that are there about what the client wants. Put yourself in the client's shoes and see how will you deliver a great event, a great wedding, a great tour. What would it be if you were in that client’s place? This has been our approach from the time of the inception of the company. It has got more refined after Covid, and people have started focusing more on personalisation.
When it is about weddings, while you may have the scale of the wedding to be large, yet it has to be personal. You don't want people to be lost in a crowd, and you want them to feel that they are part of the celebration. So, this kind of personalisation is something that we are working on and bringing to each event, where every person feels special, that he/she is a part of that wedding, that he is a part of that event, conference, convention, or tour is very personal. We have been at it for a very long time.
Additionally, today everything is social media driven. It is about the experiences that you witness when you or someone else goes on a holiday. What they share on social media is something that viewers are exposed to - it influences the decisions of those viewers, and it influences their perspective and vision. Everybody wants to see that great picture and have a picture-perfect holiday. They want to have a picture-perfect wedding. So, it has become much more difficult for wedding planners or tour operators to reach the expectations of clients. It is not impossible. It is just by a sheer way of navigating the space that you are in, understanding the client, creating those wow moments and very special moments during the tour or during the wedding which will make you stand apart from the other companies in this business. At Tamarind Global, we consciously work towards making that difference, wherein the client is completely stunned by the work that we do and the services that we deliver. After all, we, as a brand, do not own anything. It's a service industry that we are in, and our services are something that we take pride in.
We want to create a physical presence of our customer's dreams. The special moment that they have thought about, the entire tour that they are taking, the experiences that they look forward to - we want to make those a reality.
How does Tamarind Global ensure seamless coordination for large-scale events in the space of MICE, tours, weddings, events, travel and corporate gatherings?
The first thing is your people. The important factor is that it's a people-centric business. The people you hire, the people that work for you, have to be people who believe in the dream. They believe they are there for the customer. I always refer to Mahatma Gandhi's quote about the customer, which outlines that you exist for the customer, the customer doesn't exist for you – that’s how you believe in the dream.
If you are going to deliver large-scale events or even personalised events, it's about how you train and teach your people. Empower them to make decisions, help them learn from your mistakes, guide them and give them a free hand but still be accountable for all the decisions that they make, which is always in the interest of the customer.
Also, planning is very important, wherein we have to continue a very clear communication with the client. The deliverables have to be drawn up very lucidly. What is it that are we doing? What are the client's expectations? What is our expectation of the client? What are we supposed to deliver? Because it's a two-way street and we have to deliver value for money. If you do not get the client the worth for their buck, if they feel short-changed, then it's not a win-win situation. A detailed project that outlines every aspect is required, along with a timeline and delivery on that timeline is pertinent.
For vendors, we make sure our selection process is extremely tightened. They have to share the same vision as us and have to be the best in the industry. They have to keep checklists for everything that they do, especially detailed ones for every occasion that they do at a wedding.
Contract reading is something that we overlook a lot of times. We spend a lot of time going through contracts, minute details, which are fine-tuned, etc, because one small glitch in a contract could affect an event. As we are in this business, which is human-based, and it relies on a lot of moving parts, so one has to have to have a backup plan ready.
While this is happening, the learning process also needs to continue. So, after every project is completed, we do a review of it. We take complete notes of how the project was executed, the delivery of our vendors, our project performance, our successes on the project, our learnings on the project, about avoiding making those mistakes in future etc. Every project has a review, and these findings are shared across various teams. Every transformation that you make in one department is also a learning for another department, which helps in the sharing of knowledge among teams.
