Time to find your niche
Niche tourism is gaining popularity, but it's not everyone's cup of tea to find the right niche. speaks to travel agents who have found their niche, which is their passion, and seem to be quite successful at what they do.
The niche tourism we are focussing right now is exotic experiences within the destination. Curating exotic experiences for an experienced traveller is niche in itself. For example, in a Spain itinerary, giving self-drive in a vintage car, organising Astro-tourism with night star gazing spots and local culinary gastronomic experiences make a trip more memorable. The reason behind creating exotic experiences within any place is to stand out with the regular run of the mill itineraries. The only way to stand out is with the destination knowledge, impeccable service levels and out of the box experiences. Doing this makes our clients come back to us and passing the word around.
We focus purely on golfing vacations, corporate golf events and major golf tournaments. Our aim is to promote golf as a sport and India as a top golfing destination. The Ministry of Tourism, under the Niche Tourism policy has brought in a lot of support for the trade. Interest in golfing is growing. As a result, the number of golfers going abroad to play and vacation is also increasing. What’s important is golfers are big spenders if the average tourist will spend USD 2,000, the golfer would spend USD 5,0006,000. Also, golfing vacations are also longer – more than 2-3 weeks. We now have offices in the USA and Dubai as they are big source markets.
We have always been into promoting niche destinations. One of them is marathon hopping. I am a runner myself and in 2018 I took a group of runners for the Tromsø Midnight Sun Marathon. It was an amazing experience for my runners and many of them did post-tours around the Scandinavian and Baltic regions. Thereafter in 2019, we became the official operators for the Berlin Marathon and we had about 20-odd runners going for this. We gave them options of doing a run, spa and celebrate itinerary. So active holidays, especially since the pandemic, is catching on in India. This year too, we have 24 runners going for various marathons.
I focus on niche products such as honeymoons and self-drive holidays, especially in the luxury and experiential space. Such kind of holidays are gaining popularity among the clients that I cater to. With the festive and the wedding season coming up, we do see an increase in demand for this. On the other hand, self-drives are popular year-round with FITs and corporates alike. We have traditionally been curating vacations as per the client needs, so it is important that we know and understand the pulse of the client and their preferences for travel. With so much pent-up travel, demand has increased, and people like to do a lot of exploration on their own, and we help them tie it all up all together.
Post COVID, I had some clients who wanted an experience. These clients had survived cancer. What I see is that people want to experience and feel alive – celebrate life! So, we recently did an only-women group to Sicily. It involved a lot of local cuisine and local experiences. Personally, it was such a joy planning this for these clients who have bounced back to life and want to re-experience life. So, we did Sicily and Greece. We also do a lot of reunions of families and alumni groups, which is curated to their taste. They do not want to go on any fixed package.