Another feather in Bonton’s cap
Avanish Sharma, Founder & Managing Director, Bonton Group, was recently felicitated with the ‘Glory of India’ Award at Dubai.
The Founder and Managing Director of Bonton Group of companies, Avanish Sharma was felicitated by H.E. T. P. Seetharam, Ambassador of India to the UAE, in Dubai for his outstanding achievements and distinguished global services towards travel and hospitality industry.
Avanish, who comes from a humble background, received his secondary education from Colvin Taluqdars' College, Lucknow, and graduated in Economics and MBA in Finance. He strongly believes that technology will be a game changer in the travel industry and emphasises on implementing best technology solutions at Bonton.
His focus on technology made him to start Bonton Infotech last year to work on Innovative solutions for trav- el technology. Bonton Infotech has an experienced information technology team that works as an independent IT company for its clients.
Bonton Tours & Travel LLC, formed in 2008 in Dubai, is a leading destination management company in UAE that serves more than 40,000 tourists every year.
Seeing the potential in India’ domestic and international tourism sectors, he started a travel management company in India, Bonton Holidays Pvt. Ltd in 2009. Both India and Dubai companies have seen yearon-year growth in business and infrastructure. The Dubai-based company today owns one of the largest fleets of vehicles and a 110-feet multi-level luxury yacht. Bonton has also extended its footprints at Mauritius and Sweden by setting up its operations in these destinations.
In 2010 he was awarded in Dubai with India Achievers Award. Travel Industry recognized Bonton’s services in the form of many awards such as Most Innovative Travel Management Company, Best Travel Management Company, Top Travel Organizers, Market Development Award, Business Development Award.
Avanish, who is based out of Dubai, likes to be connected with the travel fraternity in India as well and loves meeting travel agents and hoteliers to get their direct feedback. He was invited as one of the guests at National CSR Summit along with our Tourism Minister and many other dignitaries from the United Nations, large corporates and government departments. He is serving as director on the board of Vibhs Financial, UK and advisory boards of several other institutes.
Before venturing to become an entrepreneur, Avanish worked with leading multinational companies in financial and commodity derivatives for almost a decade. However, his success there did not give him satisfaction as he had always dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur and hoped to form a big company which would create job opportunities for people of different educational qualifications and skillsets. Blessed with clear vision and astute business sense, Avanish formed his first company, Bonton Tours & Travel LLC in 2008 at Dubai. Bonton Tours & Travels serves more than forty thousand tourists every year.
However, by conventional wisdom, 2008 was not a good time to incubate such ideas due to global financial crisis. He recalls that in times of great stress and continued pressure due to recession in the market, he faced criticism from all his well wishers but his wife, Lakshmi always supported him to plan his long travels of many many weeks to rise from the hard times. He used to work 20 hours a day and learned a lot. Even today, Avanish feels that listening to his heart was the best decision he made.