With its SaaS-based solution, TourWiz not only wants to provide its complete back-end solutions to agencies, but it also seeks to develop an online marketplace for the travel trade community.
Hazel Jain
TourWiz provides travel professionals with all the digital tools and content they need to work more efficiently and grow their business in the post-pandemic world. Swapnil Shaha, Chief Executive Officer, TourWiz, explains the concept behind the start-up.
Shaha says, “TourWiz was launched for all the smaller travel agents, taking care of all their back-office needs and providing them with an office on-the-go. We offer back-end solutions, starting from creating leads, sending itineraries and quotations to clients, invoicing, and recording this for their financial analysis. This includes revenue and sales reports. With this product, we want to help them focus on marketing while we offer them support in operations.” back-end solutions, starting from creating leads, sending itineraries and quotations to clients, invoicing, and recording this for their financial analysis. This includes
TourWiz is a joint venture between TravelCarma, a global travel technology brand, and Monarch Networth Capital, a financial services company in India. It is relevant for leisure travel and home-based agencies, outbound and inbound operators, and DMCs. It is a user-friendly, SaaSbased product, and it comes with a subscription.
“In essence, agencies get a readymade product from us. We are continuously adding features to it based on their feedback. Moreover, each of the tour operators can avail of our ‘Partner With Us’ programme. Here, they can start putting in their special deals and promotions for all our subscriber agents to see and promote them to their own clients. We are building a community for the travel trade on our platform where the travel agent can come and place a request and benefit from our wide network of tour operators, our partners, and other travel agents,” Shaha adds.
The product is now on trial and the subscription will start on January 1, 2022. Shaha reveals, “We have a monthly, quarterly, six-monthly, and yearly plan for subscriptions. The monthly fee will be `625 plus GST. The price point has been kept affordable. And as soon as they get rewards points, and if they are able to stretch those rewards points to this value, they can use the system literally for free!” It is now heading towards foraying into the Northern and Eastern states of India, so by December end it will have covered the entire country.
Free upgrades Sharing the technology side of the product, Saurabh Mehta, Co-Founder, TourWiz, says, “As of date, we have 5,000 subscribers on our platform. So we do not sell anything on our platform. Our partners directly connect with the agencies. These partners can be either hoteliers or tour operators.”
Expounding further, Mehta says, “Our focus is on subscriptions and bringing them together. So it is like a marketplace. And since this is a SaaS-based model, customisations and upgrades are completely free. We will take ideas from our customers and incorporate them.”
I would like to thank the Prime Minister, Finance Minister and Tourism Minister for announcement of relief measures for the tourism sector and taking up issues concerning the industry. We welcome the financial help for tourist guides and tour operators. It is also good that the recognised entities are being supported. The support that has come in terms of visa being announced free for the first 500,000 e-Tourist visas that will be applied for, will be a game changer. It sends a positive signal to the whole word that India is getting ready to open, the vaccination drive has picked up, number of cases are going down. Through this, we also want to send a message to the industry that please get recognised, so that you can be benefitted by any of the schemes He also reveals that the team is now working on multiple templates. “If a client grows tired of one template, they can change it while the content remains the same. So during Diwali, you can have one template, and another one for Holi. Clients get pretty excited about it. The product is completely mobile-friendly and can be operated off of any device. Right now, we are trying to automate the entire accounting process. This is especially helpful for smaller agencies,” Mehta says. The content includes over 600 airlines, 135,000 hotels, 400,000 activities, as well as 10,000 transfers.
Shaha adds, “We are looking at reaching out to the trade through all the national travel associations, such as TAAI, TAFI, ETAA UTEN – all of them. We have already started talking to them and are trying to become their allied members since booking is not part of our business today, and we are not an IATA organization. Our dream is to reach 10,000 members by the end of the year.”
Swapnil Shaha CEO TourWiz
“We are buildinga community”
Saurabh Mehta Co-Founder TourWiz
“Customisations are completely free”
