There are some who are born to do business and some who are born to spread the goodness through their business – Harmandeep Singh Anand, Co-founder at Global Panorama Showcase and Managing Director at Jagsons Travels Pvt. Ltd. falls in the latter category. Born and brought up in Nagpur with an engineering degree in Polymer Technology from UK, he pursued his passion for ‘travel’ and his love for sharing his knowledge and experience with people – as a result, what he has today is a multi-city leading travel trade show – Global Panorama Showcase (GPS), which is educating, empowering and caring for the travel fraternity and helping them in extending their services and business on a global level. Extremely humble and accommodating, Harmandeep, doing his fabulous 40s proud, is truly the stuff what leadership is made of.
Priyanka Saxena Ray
There are not many people in the travel industry, especially the ones who stay as busy as he does, who would always call you back, to apologise for not picking your call earlier. Harmandeep Singh Anand is humility wrapped in a business mind. He was born in a business family and was inspired by some heroic travel tales of his uncle, who went on a road trip from India to London way back in 1973. One of the first to get a degree in Polymer Engineering from the London School of Polymer Technology, the travel bug had caught on to Harman much before he formally “joined” the family business. Not the kinds to spend education money on travel ventures; he worked while studying in the UK and would spend his income of seeing the world. “I remember travelling through the Europe on a Eurail youth-pass and explored 26 cities in just 28 days. I would walk 10 – 12 hours a day to see as much of a city as possible,” he reminisces.
He finished his education and came back to Nagpur to join in the various verticals of the family business at that time. However, sensing his restlessness and seeing his passion for travel, his father propelled him towards the travel wing of the business – Jagsons Travels, and the rest, as they say, is history! In order to be better equipped to handle the travel agency, Harman did an IATA Training Course, which he finished in 14 days and scored a 99.5% marks on the same, aptly proving that when you turn your passion to education, nothing can hold you back. “While I was actively involved at Jagsons Travels, I had mentored around 5000 students, who would approach us for their travel bookings for going outside India and studying. It was my passion to share my knowledge and experience with those who could benefit from it. Jagsons Travels was a pioneer agency in Central India and we had a good percentage of business coming from those who would be keen on sending their kids abroad. While booking etc. would be done for the child going abroad, we would also extend our services to parents for their follow up visits, where to stay etc. and this is how gradually we increased our service base and clientele. In 2004 – 2005 we started our own web portal and gradually used it for our own b2b business.”
Through it all, Harman was also actively involved in TAAI (Travel Agents Association of India) and was the Founding Chairman of the Nagpur TAAI Chapter from 2008 – 2011. He was elected as an MC member after that and was made the National Secretary from 2012 – 2014. During his tenure at TAAI, wherein he gave a lot of Service Tax lectures to the members of the fraternity and played a significant role in arranging almost six international TAAI Conventions, Harman realised that there are many travel agents across our country that need hand holding in order to grow and strengthen their business. “Since my younger brother Rishi had also joined business, both of us used to travel extensively to numerous travel shows abroad. We understood the nitty-gritties involved in hosting and managing a travel show and we also realised how neglected the Tier II and Tier III sectors were in our country. These were the “mines” that hoarded huge business potential in them, but was something that the international event organisers or international tourism boards, airlines, etc. were not realising. They were primarily focusing on the metros only. These Tier II and Tier III cities, which were treated as step-children, were the real places where actual money was. What we saw was a huge opportunity for us. We planned to launch an event as early as 2006 but could not due to various reasons. Finally we decided to launch our event as Showcase Jagsons in Nagpur in 2013,” shares Harman.
While we would need a complete separate interview to do justice to what GPS is all about (if you don’t know about it already that is), the force behind the venture, Harmandeep Singh Anand, who is doing wonderfully well in his ‘Fabulous 40s’, has upped the ante in the world of travel trade events, with the help of an extremely talented and hardworking team comprising Rishiraj Singh Anand, Joint Managing Director, Tanushka Kaur Anand, Executive Director, Madhu Saliankar, Executive Director, Ankush Nijhawan, Executive Director; Mohit Deshpande, Executive Director; Sobinder Singh Kohli, Executive Director and Rajendra Akolkar, CEO. What started as a humble show with some 30-40 exhibitors and 200 odd buyers at Nagpur in 2013 has today grown by leaps and bounds and added many smaller verticals within it. Every year, newer cities are added to the show – Ahmadabad, Chandigarh, Kolkata, Kochi, Pune and the latest entrants this year – Hyderabad and Lucknow. Amongst the various smaller verticals in GPS, the one gaining most power is ‘Edwin’ – the educational workshops hosted for agents in India. Every Edwin has a name and there are many success stories that have come out of each. Keeping his main motive to education the travel industry intact, GPS will soon start doing skill development as well as KIT Talks (Knowledge, Inspiration and Training). One of the most unique things about GPS is that it is a complete paperless event – all thanks to the App created by CVENT for GPS, which is managed and handled by Tanushka, who is fast learning the tricks of the trade with her father.
