Mobile app for U&I Holidays
At its recently-held six-city roadshow across India, U&I Holidays launched a mobile app for end customers, enabling them to travel without their vouchers and even give instant feedback.
Nisha Verma
U&I Holidays recently launched a mobile application for its customers during its six-city roadshow across India to engage and educate the agents about its product offerings.
Shyam Upadhyay, Director, U&I Holidays, said, “Innovation is most important today with every wholeseller or retailer having an online portal. The latest addition for our portal is mobile application, which is not for the operator. This mobile application is going to be used by the end user. We will start this from Bali. A guest travelling to Bali now need not carry any hard copies. He can just download the application and can have all his itinerary and vouchers on the mobile phone. At the same time, we have connected the driver and the client directly, just like in Uber or Ola cabs, allowing guests to see where the driver is, or if he has reached or not. Also, most of the Indian restaurants, shopping places have been marked and mapped in the application.” He added that it is advantageous for them to get instant feedback. “As a DMC, real-time feedback is the most important for us. If clients get convinced on tour, it’s fantastic. But if anything is wrong and he comes back to India, one can probably lose the client or bear a compensation. Now, with this real-time feedback, everyday, once the tour gets over, client will automatically get a pop-up, and if they have put it forth. That will directly go and all the senior management at U&I Holidays. We have a dedicated quality control team who’s going to work on it. These are the real-time advantages, which, according to me no DMC is doing.” Our fourth edition of the roadshow travelled to Kolkata, Delhi, Surat, Ahmedabad, Pune and Mumbai, with around 1,000 tour operators in attendance. Ashish
Indulkar, Director, U&I Holidays, added, “This year’s roadshow has been a big success. The business has been increasing as Bali has gained pace as a destination and with between India and Indonesia, the business has doubled. Hopefully, with our online presence in the next one or two months, there will be an increase of more than 25-30 per cent all around the year.” Upadhyay added, “Apart from Bali, this year we are covering two more destinations— Maldives and Australia. We’ve been doing Maldives for the last eight years, but we have started doing Australia only recently. We want to sell more of Australia, for which we want to get into Tier II and III cities, where information is the most important factor. Australia is not a destination where every small retail operator can go and sit. Hence, a DMC like us, which has a strong and good network with strong presence in nine Indian cities, it becomes easy for us to sell and educate about the destination.” Going forward, the company is going to add more destinations to its portfolio. Indulkar shared, “In 2018, we added Australia to our kitty, and currently we are targeting only around 2,000 customers visiting Australia. In the next six months, we are looking to set our footprint either in Dubai or in Singapore. However, the biggest market that we are looking at is Europe, for which our homework has already started.”