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    Govt has timed tourism relief measures very well, says Madhavan Menon of Thomas Cook India

    Synopsis

    "If you want tourism to benefit, the whole industry has to re-emerge and provide business. It cannot be that a few of us who survived the pandemic go out there and do all the businesses. That is just not possible. We need to allow the broader industry to re-emerge, something that will reflect on the health of the entire industry."

    Govt has timed tourism relief measures very well, says Madhavan Menon of Thomas Cook India
    2022 is likely to start off with a bit of a bang, if not 2021-end, says Menon.
    Madhavan Menon of Thomas Cook India sheds light on the current state of India's tourism industry and the likely impact of the latest round of relief measures on business. Edited excerpts:

    ET Now: You have started a holiday-now-pay-later scheme. How does that work? Also, how would you deal with potential defaulters?
    Madhavan Menon: We are obviously not the ones who are financing this arrangement. We have a partner who is experienced in giving loans to people. They will follow their processes and policies and identify a customer who is acceptable to them. Once that process is done, we undertake the booking and as soon as the customer comes back from their holiday they would have to repay the amount as agreed between the lender and the customer. We are a facilitator in this process and we are not taking any risk from our end.

    Share with us your outlook on travel trends as the second wave shows signs of easing...
    I think the domestic market is very clearly seeing a lot of interest. We have seen interest in both travel now and pay later. We are seeing a lot of interest in TravShield. The three destinations that we have seen early interest in are Kashmir, Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh. My expectation is that over the next couple of months we would see other destinations within India opening up. Dubai and Maldives will also open up earlier than a lot of other markets.

    An interesting development happened yesterday, with Switzerland saying that they would start issuing short term visas again to Indian nationals. So I think things will open up one by one. It will be a very steady process that will be followed. My expectation is that over the next month or so we are going to see a flurry of announcements by various countries about opening up. India is not going to be an exception to that.

    On the domestic side, my expectation is that India will announce a policy of issuance of visas for visitors coming into India over the next one quarter at least. It may come somewhere between September or October when India formally starts opening up the borders. This is obviously linked to the vaccinations.

    How grave was second wave's impact, and what kind of pick-up have you witnessed in terms of inquiries?
    It may sound a little contrarian, but we have actually come out of the second wave far more optimistic than we did from the first wave. That was primarily due to the fact that during the first wave we had no clue when the vaccines would be coming in. But now we have clear visibility of the vaccination programme. If we continue at the current rate, my expectation is that travel will open up sooner rather than later.

    Tell us a bit about the deal you signed with the Shanghai Disney Resort via a unit of your company.
    This contract was in the making for more than 15 months. We won the bid, but then the pandemic came and things slowed down. With the reopening of China, Shanghai Disney started ramping up the opening of the park a lot quicker. They are celebrating their 5th anniversary as we talk. So our contract has started.

    We are essentially in an exclusive contract to provide imaging solutions to Shanghai Disney. This is a very important contract both from DEI’s perspective as well as Shanghai Disney’s perspective, because both wanted to work with each other for some time. Now it has been achieved.

    It will also bring about an important change in the future perspective of DEI because the dependence on certain markets would be reduced or diluted with Shanghai Disney coming in. It would make an important contribution and you will appreciate that anything that we do in China has got multiplier effect that comes with any operation in China as compared to any other market. So opening of Shanghai Disney is a very welcome development. We expect to follow it up with another opening early next month at Universal Beijing.

    What is the plan for online foreign exchange platform which is beginning to pay off?
    We had a foreign exchange platform available for more than 15 months. The arrival of the pandemic only speeded up the number of transactions that we'd started doing online. And while I would not call the pandemic a welcome development, the impact of the pandemic has been a welcome development. All foreign exchange businesses are doing transactions almost entirely online and that is something we are ready for and have the ability to do. It is something we were prepared for and we would only keep expanding it as we go forward.

    In FY21, your losses were Rs 400 crore from about Rs 69 crore in FY20. When do you expect to get back to normalcy?
    Nobody has been able to predict the movement of the pandemic. It is like chasing a cat’s tail and not being able to catch it. But vaccination is making progress and if we assume for a moment that in the last quarter of the year almost every eligible Indian would have had at least one jab and the number of people who'd had two jabs would have increased significantly, we would see domestic travel pick up pace. We expect international travel also to reopen.

    In the short term, events we see on the horizon IPL 21 part 2, Expo 2020 in Dubai in October, and in early 22 we have the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Now these are all in close proximity to India and therefore the opportunity to travel to watch some of these events is by itself something that can be within reach as far as India is concerned.

    My expectation is that 2022 will start off with a bit of a bang, if not 2021-end. Having said that my operations at DEI and Desert Adventures, both of which are based in Dubai, are beginning to function well. I expect Asia to start opening up by the end of the year and as a preparation for this we have launched our summer season already. You have seen the new innovation that we launched. TravShield is essentially focussed on giving passengers comfort as far as hygiene and health issues are concerned. IT is a first-of-its-kind in the industry and that we will be able to benefit from being an early mover in this business.

    What is your take on the latest relief measures for tourism? Will they help the sector recover faster?
    I think there are three very important announcements yesterday. One is the 5 lakh visas that would be given free of charge to kick start the inbound tourism into India. Obviously these will need to be preceded by India opening up. This announcement gives me even more affirmation that the day of opening is on the government’s horizon and they will make a decision sooner than later.

    The second particular of importance is the financial support to guides. As you know, tour guides are an essential element for tourists coming into India. India is not a straightforward tourist destination; there are a lot of services that tourists require when they reach India. Guides are most probably the most important element after service transport or air transport.

    A lot of these tourist guides have not had any source of employment over the last 15-18 months. There are people in the mid 40s and above who got families to support so. I think this was a very welcome move.

    The third one is the loan guarantee scheme which is up to Rs 10 lakh for recognised travel and tourism stakeholders. Obviously we will need to see the fine print, but it does look like a great step.

    My view is very simple: if you want tourism to benefit, the whole industry has to re-emerge and provide business. It cannot be that a few of us who survived the pandemic go out there and do all the businesses. That is just not possible. We need to allow the broader industry to re-emerge, something that will reflect on the health of the entire industry.

    I think the government has done a very right thing by recognising that this is the time when it needs to provide the support or help to some of these businesses to re-emerge from the pandemic and get ready for the reopening.


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