The Hindu Business Line : Idlis in Interlaken

I WENT on a holiday abroad recently. Except, at times, I wondered if I had ever left India. At Venice, where you could see them buying up Murano glass by the carton, or trooping up the Jungfraujoch by train, where special trains were organised for them, there were Indians everywhere. Everywhere.

Part of me was faintly peeved: after all, foreign travel should yield a foreign experience, not an extended Indian one. Was this Interlaken or was it Matheran? Another, larger, part of me was tickled to pieces. Finally, we have the global Indian: able, and more importantly, willing, to pay to see the world. In Interlaken, there were menus written in Hindi. Restaurants called out to Indians with a Namaste. Gunther, our energetic driver, has a van plastered with stickers offering Indians customised experiences for anything from eating to paragliding. And everywhere I saw confident, hedonistic Indians slowly altering the tourist experience. At Venice, one snippy mask-seller made a crack about Indians; the buyer, instead of getting rattled, told him calmly, "The fact is that there are more Indians here spending their money buying your stuff, than there are Italians in India doing the same. So who needs whom?"

Yet, an overheard conversation in one of the trips (a train chock-a-block with my fellow countrymen) made me wonder. As one lady remarked to another, they had toyed with going on a Bharat Darshan, but the economics of a Swiss package won, hands down. Not just because it was a foreign experience, but because it was actually cheaper.

At one level this was great for the Indian ego, but at another level I wondered - why were we all seeing the wonders of another land? Sure, it is always more fun to go abroad than it is to stay within one's own country - but should be it be so much cheaper as well? It now costs the same to go to Frankfurt and back as it does to do a Chennai-Delhi-Chennai hop. It is cheaper to stay in a hotel in Lucerne than it is to stay in a similar starred hotel in Mahabalipuram. Whatever happened to India's cost advantage in services?

This is an interesting case. On one hand, we have the foreign governments (particularly Singapore and Switzerland), which have taken Indian tourism very seriously. As the rest of the world has got sated by the wonders of the Alps and the shopping in Singapore, moving on to more exotic locations in New Zealand and Africa, the Indian globetrotter has saved the day. Packages bundle rail journeys with hotel bookings at a price that makes it more affordable and more comfortable to holiday under the shadow of the Jungfrau than to go to Mansarovar. Lufthansa aggressively targets the Indian public, paying attention to meals, Indian cabin crew ... and prices that make it hard to resist. I see huge ads in Indian dailies beckoning desi tourists to the wonders of Switzerland.

Now for the home front. To begin with, the air fares are colossal in comparison. Yes, check and apex fares have made a huge difference, but they are still limited in number. Star hotels are horribly expensive. They appear to revolve around international visitors and businesspeople - at times I wonder if they see Indian tourists as a market at all! And then, of course, there is the 10-15 per cent increase that happens in Indian hotel rates each October, like clockwork (each of which makes Switzerland look even more attractive)! Finally, putting together a holiday is exhausting. Who can co-ordinate between air timings, hotels, cabs and the like?

Is it such an insurmountable task, creating similar packages for India, rolling hotels-tourist spots-trains-air fares all together into a seamless offering that makes touring an effortless and affordable experience? The market is there - the middle and upper middle classes are sloshing with moolah, and have now evolved from acquiring possessions to acquiring experiences. Long weekends see beach resorts filled with Indian tourists, not foreign visitors. And Indian tourists are now the fourth largest spenders in Singapore. Ironically, other countries are better at recognising our market potential than we are.

So coming back to the question - why can't it happen? One (rather gloomy) view: the government will never be able to align so many disparate service providers, and no single organisation will take the initiative on its own.

But I wonder if it is quite so far-fetched. As any corporate traveller knows, hotels these days offer rock-bottom rates for corporate packages: a corporate tie-up lets you stay in a five-star at a rate which would normally not get you toe space in a three-star. Why can't this be available to tourists as well? Our hotels in Switzerland had a rack rate of many multiples than what we actually paid for, and that too, in season.

Another service organisation has already shown the way. If you sit in the Apollo, Chennai today, you find yourself listening more to Bengali than to Tamil. Evidently the hospital has done such a fantastic job marketing itself to West Bengal that they troop down regularly, traversing the length of the country in search of medical relief. I am told that doctors and staff in Apollo now have learnt a smattering of Bengali.

Or take its medical tourism business: Already, Apollo gets seven per cent of its turnover from international patients: some 43,000 foreign patients were treated by just Apollo during the last three-and-a-half years.

I recently heard about an American who came to India for hip surgery: the hospital representatives met his family at the airport, helped them through immigration and drove them to the hospital in a Toyota van, organised hotel rooms, and stocked it with fruit and drinks. After surgery, the hospital loaned the family a mobile phone so they could stay in touch once they left the hospital. This is the level of service a hotel should be providing, not a hospital! No wonder that it is building both a strong domestic and international business.

Yes, the hospitality business, particularly at the premium end, was built upon foreign tourists - but times are changing. Sticking to an outdated business model, and refusing to take the new Indian tourist seriously might just lead to a surprise that few would have even considered a few years ago - a loss of business not to competing Indian hotels, but to competing countries.

(The writer is a Chennai-based management consultant. Karate-gy is the proprietary name for the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow.)

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Catching the wave

Advertising and the long arm of coincidence?

Variety

Idlis in Interlaken

Building the radio brand

Leaving no stone unturned

Five gurus on the firing line!