Vasudha Sondhi: “Anyone can open a shop – that is the challenge”

India Outbound gets insights from the head of Outbound Marketing, an organisation that manages portfolios of many leading international hotels. The trend shows that at any point of time, Indian outbound travellers pick value for money over almost anything.

Article by: June Mukherjee

What is the current scenario of Indian outbound Industry from the perspective of hospitality?

India has now finally arrived as a very important source market for most international hotel chains and hotels. The trend in bookings is changing very rapidly, From booking with the agents, to tour operators, to online and hotel websites the choices are multiple and diverse.

We look at a broad-based distribution. For each of the brands For whom we manage the sales, we identify the various channels of distribution and handle the sales accordingly. Since most of our brands are First class or luxury, roughly 10 pc of our sales are through fixed departure or tying up with various tour operators. The biggest segments that we can manage to influence are the MICE and weddings’ segments_ We also work with corporate companies, not with the intention of cutting out intermediaries but more to drive-up end customer’s demand and visibility. Uber-luxury hotels still tend to shy away because their customer bases are small and they don’t generally come through Intermediaries. the sale for such products bends to be a bit more complicated.

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