Offering more properties for holidays
Maison De Voyage intends to expand destination focus for Interhome. The company is pushing for destinations like France, Austria, Italy and Spain, by eliminating booking fee from the reservation system for transparent pricing.
In 2011, holiday homes and apartments provider, Interhome appointed Maison de Voyage, a marketing and sales department of Zaka Group, as their GSA in India. Since then, Maison de Voyage is educating Indian travel trade about the benefits of opting for holiday homes during vacations for families and FITs. However, today, the product is popular only for Switzerland while Interhome is present in 31 countries with more than 33,000 properties to offer. It is keen to promote all 31 countries but four destinations are on top priority – France, Italy, Spain and Austria. Moreover, to bring in price transparency in the offering throughout every sales channel, the company has also eliminated the ‘booking fee’ effective January 1, 2014.
Providing more information about the destination portfolio, Jeniffer Daruwalla, General Manager, Maison de Voyage Pvt Ltd - A Division of Zaka Group, said, “Switzerland as a market is performing quite well. But we have more than just the Alps country. Our aim for this year is to educate our travel partners about Interhome properties located in other countries and destinations. For instance, we have excellent cottages and chalets in Austria which is globally known for ski-holidays. We are not only trying to develop skitourism market in India but also assisting our travel trade partners to include Interhome properties in their itineraries for travellers. We are primarily pushing for properties located in France, Italy, Spain and Austria which are receiving good number of Indian families and FIT travellers. We are also in talks with France and Austria tourism boards in India to see if they can promote holiday home stay options among their travel agent network in India.” With India being a price and value sensitive market, Interhome India webpage required transparent pricing policy for agents and travellers. Thus, Maison de Voyage eliminated the booking fee from its online booking channel, effective January 1, 2014. “We discarded the booking fee model and still maintained the commission rate for travel agent partners to ensure flat pricing policy across all our channels. No doubt that it is impacting our bottom lines, but we are confident that the volume will increase and thus, the business growth will be healthy this year.”