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In this ongoing series, we explore how humans of travel are mitigating the ongoing COVID19 outbreak. Today Nagsri Sashidhar from NAGSRI shares her story with us.
The journey with the travel industry started 26 years ago, 13 years with Thomas Cook and 13 years with Mercury Travels. Major part of my career has been in the Leisure sector, mainly FIT- innovating and tailor-making products for clients. In February 2019, after all these years I decided to start on my own as an entrepreneur. I was always queued in FIT so it was a natural progression curating experiences for clients. When I started off, I didn’t get a minute to sit tight and it was like a tsunami of sorts. I got so busy, it was extremely overwhelming and humbling. The year overall went superbly! My focus was “off the beaten track”, experiential, quality travel and the clientele I dealt with were all referrals. It was a conscious decision that I will start off by myself, so it was me and my 100 happy clients. I’m very proud of myself that I managed to achieve this aim of touching a century single handedly. The journey was so good that I said year two is going to be even better and I probably spoke too soon. It was a “Dhamakedar” year indeed. No one thought that something like COVID19 pandemic would loom large in front of us.
I heard China is enveloped with the virus situation, in my mind I was thinking there is nothing new and it will just trickle off the way it appeared. One led to the other and before we realised it was all over the globe, from China, Japan, Italy, France. The moment it started spreading, we started getting cancellations and then the flights were in a frenzy, so it just did not stop. It was very disheartening and the worst thing is we don’t even know when the damn virus is going to leave, it is so uncertain. When I talk to friends across the trade in different parts of the world, every single one of them is reconciling with the fact that we are going to be status quo for the next 8-9 months if not more. Even if I look at the first person wanting to travel, it will be late winter.
Travel and hospitality is the first and worst hit because it is not the first priority for clients even when things come about because economically we are set back many years. The recession will take its toll, so even if people open up, I’m not sure if travel is the first thing they will do. I am hoping they would, but I don’t know.
There definitely is going to be a major shakeout. With our country, we don’t have a single body that regulates the entry of travel agents. A lot of websites and smaller agents will at some point need to shut probably. The ones who can survive will pull through. I believe the revolution has just begun and many won’t be on the other side of the COVID. That is the sad part because they will not be able to sustain. When you are not getting a single rupee in, how will you manage salaries, taxes which is another story altogether as the GST was killing a lot of agents and the TCS which was supposed to get rolled out from April 1 would have added to the misery. I don’t think anybody realises the complexity of the tourism industry as such.
We started a Twitter campaign about TCS and managed to get some air time on the news. A politician came on board who did not even know where we stand as far as the online OTOs are concerned because it is not a level playing field at all. You cannot compare us with Expedia and Booking.com as they are not Indian entities and they do not pay GST and TCS, automatically making us more expensive from a client’s point of view. So complex points like these need to be ironed out once we emerge from this victoriously.
We need to change the way we do business now that we have got the time to innovate, think differently, think out of the box and see how we can do. Everyone is in a stage where money is a huge issue and the overall scenario is very bleak. I’m sure we are going to come out of this and when we do we’ll just have less players. We need to just march ahead.
2020 was really looking like a damn good year because people were getting more aware of travelling, willing to experiment, willing to spend so it was looking very positive.
Being in the industry for so long, nothing like this ever happened. We would only read about outbreaks like these in history and now we are living one, it is scary.
We are a resilient variety and we are going to come out of this, we have to really start thinking and ensure we do business more intelligently and differently once we come back.
Source: travelnewsdigest.in
