Secure your future with ‘BIMA KARLO’
Arvind Tandon, Director, Ark Travels, is an expert and a well-known personality in the travel trade and has always been assisting and guiding the agent fraternity to earn additional revenues for a long time. Now, with the pandemic giving a severe setback to the entire travel and tourism industry, Ark Travels as market leaders in the cruise and leisure segment, have set up an alternate business model for the travel agents to survive the difficult times. To know more about the alternate model, TTJ speaks to Arvind Tandon, now the Founder of Bima Karlo, a new Insurance vertical which travel agents can evaluate for an alternate source of income.
It has been a sorry state of affairs for the travel, hospitality and tourism sector with major salary cuts, zero incomes for many, millions of layoffs, cruises and airlines non-operational, hotels in doldrums, small organisations out of business and even big established tourism establishments unable to pay salaries to their staff. Thus, with the travel industry coming to a standstill in early 2020, a large number of travel agents across India are constantly looking for an alternate income to survive.
Tandon says, “It has been a sorry state of affairs for the travel and hospitality sector during this pandemic. It seems that it will be only by next summer that real revenues will start flowing and jobs will get revived. Currently, most of them are jobless, starving and attempting to feed their families with substantial disruption to their lives. As market leaders in travel and as doyens of the industry, it was my responsibility to offer a new income model to our crisis-ridden community. The idea of starting an alternate viable income model came to me when we saw so many in our fraternity jobless or with no means to continue earning.”
Tandon joined hands with Anil Garg, founder of ‘Explore Travel TV’ channel, ex-CTO Sony TV and the Founder of the Internet in India, and after some months of thought and research commenced setting up the alternate business model for the travel retailers.
According to Tandon, travel agents are familiar with the commission model in their business including online portals. Soon, they discovered that the travel agents were also familiar with the insurance business having sold travel and overseas mediclaim insurance for time immemorial. Also, the insurance business had a commission structure at an unheard of twenty-five to thirty per cent to start with, while the agents earn only about eight to ten per cent selling travel products. Further, for bookings, they had to look for a model similar to that of the CRS system which is used by the agents.
“We found an Insurance broker named Robinhood, who was glad to be our principal, and they had a large workforce of about five hundred staff and they were third in the hierarchy of brokers pan India. Also, they had contracts with twenty-five Insurance companies, and lastly, and importantly, their booking arsenal had the CRS like system as well as a Mobile App for ease of selling by agents and both could provide immediate quotes and product choices of multiple Insurance companies. So, ultimately we have ‘Bima Karlo’ which is kind of offering a lifeline to agents.”
On their part, Robinhood will provide free registration, no joining fees, free online training, product training, sales assistance in different verticals of insurance such as life, vehicle, overseas, health, motor, fire, etc to travel agents across India. However, the trainings will be the key factor in product selling, pitching and claims. Tandon feels that there is so much to do in the insurance industry that agents can continue this business and earn quite well even after the travel industry is back to normal.
“With Robinhood, our principals would be varied but we depend on them for assisted training in products, selling, claims and relationships and Robinhood will facilitate tripartite contracting between us, agents and insurance principals. Bima Karlo will leverage and guarantee attractive commissions with rates appraised at a suitable time and directly paid to the agents on time. Currently, there are close thirty travel agents registered and expressed interest and the company is expecting to have over five hundred agents to join in by the end of December 2020. After a fifteen-day training, we give them a certificate,” assures Tandon.