Joy Roy Choudhury – Kolkata

The Travel Agents Association of India (TAAI), Eastern Region is looking at increasing its membership strength in the coming two years. Speaking to Express TravelWorld, Vikas Sarawgi, hon secretary, TAAI, Eastern Region said, “Our main focus would be to increase the membership strength of the Eastern Region chapter. Many of our members have left us due to several reasons. So our objective would be to bring them back into our fold and tap new areas in the region. In order to strengthen our efforts, we would be soon moving out to cities in the east like Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Ranchi and the North-East, where our numbers are few. There we plan to meet the IATA accredited travel agents and explain what is TAAI presently doing for its members and would want to do for them in the coming days. The second important thing which we are concentrating upon is interacting regularly with the consulates, deputy high commissioner offices, representative offices located in the east.”

He added, “As approval and issuance of visas is a major issue in outbound, we are regularly communicating with the foreign offices of different countries based in Kolkata like the US, UK, France, Italy, Thailand, Japan, China, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Recently, we invited representatives of VFS Global to interact with our members and help them solve their visa related queries and issues.”

TAAI, Eastern Region also plans to approach West Bengal Tourism to jointly promote ‘Brand Bengal’ at international forums. Mihin Lanka, the national low cost carrier of Sri Lanka, recently started ‘thrice-a-week’ direct flight between Colombo and Kolkata. “So we have urged our members to see that substantial business is created for the airline, failing which the service will be stopped, which will be a major blow to us. Many of the European airlines have stopped their operations from the city. At present we are left with few like DrukAir, Emirates, Etihad, Biman Bangladesh, Thai Airways, Singapore Airlines, Air Asia and Mihin Lanka.”

Speaking about promoting the eastern and northeastern states of India, Sarawgi said, “We felt that despite its tremendous potential, the eastern and northeastern states of the country have failed to come up on the global tourism map. So our efforts would be to promote and market the tourist destinations of the east and the northeast, globally as well as in other parts of the country. We are planning to approach states like Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura to jointly promote them; they have direct connectivity with Kolkata and Guwahati”.

The TAAI, Eastern Chapter is also focusing on human resource development. “We are in the process of tying-up with IT partners to provide our members training on Advanced Document Management System (ADMS) and other latest IT software and tools to increase our operational efficiency. Besides, we would pursue capacity building exercises for the travel and tourism industry to meet the demand-supply mismatch,” he opined adding, “Lastly, we would like to further strengthen our relations with the airline companies. Besides, taking up regular issues like agents’ commission, there are several issues like service tax, parity with online transactions and other issues on which we plan to work closely with the airline companies.”