Tourism Breaking News
Travkart, a unit of Holidays by Sahibji, has partnered with franchise business consulting company Sparkleminds to help with its expansion plans in India. As part of the collaboration, Travkart will offer franchising opportunities to travel agents in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, while Sparkleminds will provide them with end-to-end assistance in establishing and managing the franchise. Through this partnership, Travkart aims to create franchises pan-India with initial focus on North and East India and hopes to create 4 franchises by the next quarter and 100 franchises by 2020.
A micro website will be created for each franchisee/travel agent to ensure differentiation, flexibility and affordable pricing based on the region of operation. In addition, Travkart will handle the digital marketing and social media management for its franchisees, creating a separate Facebook page for each city to help travel agents connect and interact with locals. All travel agents need to do to apply for a Travkart franchise is fill and submit the application form online on the Travkart website.
Once they are selected as a franchisee, they will receive comprehensive assistance through the franchising process which would include step-by-step franchise management training to local partners by a qualified franchise manager. Sparkleminds will further assist Travkart to build the support systems that these travel agents franchises would need and help build trust among regional travel agents as well as customers.
Commenting on the partnership and program launch, Manheer Singh Sethi, Co-founder, Travkart.com, said, “2017 will be a very important year for Travkart in terms of increasing market penetration. Our focus is primarily on expanding to Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities in North and East India in the first phase after which we will look at a pan India footprint by working with travel agents in these markets to build 100 Travkart franchises by 2020. Through our partnership with Sparkleminds, we want to ensure a seamless process of recruiting the right franchises and managing them well for their success. Their expertise in working with local and regional franchise brands will help us create the correct systems and processes and build trust among agents and customers. We strongly believe that there is tremendous potential in the smaller cities and towns of India, as ‘Bharat’ is ready for Travel, now more than ever.”
He further added, “With the increase in air connectivity in many cities, we’ll soon be able to scale our presence from specific northern states to build a wider, pan-India reach, apart from our virtual offices. While our primary aim is to build a countrywide market presence for Travkart, selling Indian and global destinations will be the driving force of our expansion plans.”
