TravTalk Middle East Online Magazine
Satguru has been in the forefront expanding to over 60 countries worldwide. J.V.R. Fernando, General Manager, Satguru, wants to maintain this momentum of growth.
TT BUREAU
Satguru’s strategy is to be different yet be a leader in the market securing all the goals on a slow yet steady pace. The company is investing heavily in technology and to this effect they also opened a back office operation in India a couple of years ago with a team of 200 IT staff that develops their own portals for B2B or B2C customers. Apart from these tailor-made processes they still use the corporate tools from the GDS ensuring their way forward.
Satguru has now entered different verticals and among them, tourism takes pride of place–be it inbound, outbound, fixed departures, FITs, sports and medical tourism, etc. J.V.R. Fernando, General Manager, Satguru, stated, “We’ve taken a group of students from here to Sri Lanka recently for cricket and we are looking at other sports activities such as handball and basketball. In terms of medical tourism, we have already tied up with Thumbay Hospital and other hospitals in India, Thailand, Germany, etc. The main advantage that we have over others is our presence in over 60 plus countries and the fact that the operation is solely coordinated by the centralised Dubai office. The staff that would handle every medical situation will be able to directly contact us for any assistance and this clearly marks an edge over others for us. Another area we stress in medical tourism is language, to ensure that the hospital staff of our patients will know the language well. For this we have selected hospitals that would have a reasonable number of staff that can assist in the event of a language barrier.”
Satguru adapted their own methods of training and motivation of staff by ensuring one specific officer travelled to all 60 plus locations around the globe to train, mentor and motivate the team to be proactive at all times.
In 2016, Satguru sold over 3000 air tickets to Dubai alone, with 50 travel packages (including hotels, transfers, etc.) This paved way for a new lucrative market to explore; a new area of business which would multiply their services and place them as a TMC. The new element added on to the ticket sales have ensured over 500-600 tour/travel packages as against the initial 50 that was done earlier. Currently, they are expanding their network following the same goal as before ensuring they will add more to their portfolio. Before the end of the year their network expansion may reach almost 5 states in the US and 5 in Europe bringing their overall network reach to over 70 around the globe.
“Thanks to the visionary leader of Dubai His Highness Sheikh Mohamed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of UAE and Ruler of Dubai, the amount of tourists visiting the destination increases and we are able to cope with the inquiries and attend to their requirements as well as not only as DMC but also as TMC,” he concluded.
