Shreya Shimpi
ATG Tours provide customised travel packages for families, honeymooners, corporate clients, solo as well as group travellers and MICE. They also specialise in Polar and river cruises. Farhat Arfin spoke exclusively to BOTT at the OTM held in Mumbai and expressed her views about the recent trends in travel and the expectations from this year.
Tell us something about ATG Tours
We are a Chicago headquartered company. We started in India about a year back. We have offices in Kenya, Tanzania, Japan, Peru and we are in Andheri, Mumbai. We cater to MICE, FIT, leisure, fixed departures and we do end-to-end solutions. We have our own Visa department and product department and we provide end-to-end solutions for anybody who is into B2B or B2C.Mr Gupta started in the US years back and we have lots of FITs who have been dealing with us for years. They come back to us. Right now, we have a lot of NRIs who have come to India for forty-day tours and they are taking tours back-to-back with us. We are completely service oriented. We give a lot of emphasis to service in terms of the food they want if elderly couples are travelling, we ensure that there is some assistance for them. We have wheelchairs for them. We have guides who can speak different languages as per the requirement. We are very specific with our clientele because they come to us time and again due to the service we provide. So, it is very important to us that we take care of the smallest of their things. We check, especially in India, where there are not too many assisted tours for senior citizens, and we ensure that we provide that. We ensure that we keep our hotels informed, and we talk to the chefs about the meals such as vegetarian options, dairy or nut allergies. We keep them updated and we follow up and ensure that our guests get what they want. So, there is a lot of emphasis on service, personalisation and customisation. We are available 24×7. We work throughout the week. The best part about India is that we have US – basedsystems here so we make the most out of it. Sometimes the US fares come out to be cheaper if you buy from the US office because we are also a back-office to a U.S. office. We have the fares in our systems here also so we use that to our benefit and our customer’s benefit.
Are you able to achieve the 2019 figures post-pandemic?
Post-Covid, the business is just picking up. We are adding staff every day. We are looking for staff that will help us grow. We have a lot of appetite right now. The OTM is also helping us as we have been getting so many queries. We are going for SATTE as well as we are looking ahead to a beautiful and fruitful year ahead for all of us. We have had too many queries so we are just hoping that we have the right people to sail throughout the year. We are looking forward to 2023 and going forward it is going to pick up.
Does 2023 look promising to you?
Yes.2023 looks promising for the tourism business. The flights are going full and hotels are going full. We have already got lots of bookings for July and August. In fact, we were struggling to get rooms for the October departure for the Cruises so we are doing quite well this year.
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