Resort Life Travel is a leading in-bound tour operator with 12 years of experience in the Maldivian Tourism industry. Susmita Ghosh, Editor-in-Chief, Netpal Travel conversed with Mazin Mohamed, Director, Resort Life Travel in Delhi, sharing views on how the organisation was created with the intention of serving the global partners with all their travel related businesses in the Maldives.
With a brief company profile, explain your mode of functioning?
We, at Resort Life, are inbound tour operator in Maldives. We work as suppliers and not as Business to Consumers (B2C) but never ignore customers if they approach us. This is our 12th year selling Maldives to Indian, CIS and European markets. Besides, headquartered in Maldives we have our offices in Ukraine, CIS and in Mumbai and recently opened, Delhi, India to serve our regional partners more efficiently. Our service portfolio spans all across the major hotel brands of Maldives and we pride in serving our partners to ensure that our mutual holiday makers enjoy the true Maldives.
- What is your uniqueness?
We are the first Maldivian based company, which went out of the box. We came out of the country and placed us in Ukraine, help get numbers, created our presence in India and facilitated to sell. It’s easier to understand the culture, price when you are out of the country.
- Explain your present business graph and in 2018 if compared with 2017
We have our operational division in Maldives where we handle around 60 to 70 passengers every day. In 2018, our business handling in Maldives drawing at the edge of 13 per cent and the number of tourists reached to 26,000 and around 17,500 in 2017. Overall we have a turnover of more than USD 6.7 million in a year and we are still growing,
We get major junk of travellers from CIS. But since 2018 India is rising as well with 3 to 4 arrivals every day, hence we have catered 4000 travellers from India last year. To enhance our achievement, we are targeting 6000 to 10,000 travellers in 2019.
- Are you facing any challenges? If any, what are the ways out to overcome them?
To promote Maldives as a destination we face challenges mainly on promotional aspects. There should be more funding facilities for further events’ participation from the Maldives Marketing & Public Relations Corporation (MMPRC), the national tourism office of Maldives, responsible for carrying out promotional activities to boost the most preferred island destination of the world.
We also face price competition as we are working as a supplier. None in the market have exclusivity regarding price as far as any resorts are concerned. Everyone has the same pricing, it’s just the difference of mark-ups or commissions they place in. Another disagreement we face when most of the resorts give contracting to B2C who directly deal with the customers.
The way out is to go for an agreement of the incentive deal with the resorts. As a supplier we can then give net price without adding on any amount on the market price. We can keep our cost price and sell. It provides more vitality to push for the numbers hence we stand now with lot of business volumes.
- Do you think adequate awareness is created among all?
By and large awareness is created by participating in the events and exhibitions in and across the world like in Turkey, UK, Germany, Berlin, Thailand, Malaysia and many more. But we need Government assistance more for commercial announcements and eye-catching hoardings.
Product knowledge is needed further, thereby we are in the process of presentation communication with the serious professionals in the business. I travel to Pune, Hyderabad and other cities, meet the agents who do booking, train their staffers, providing vivid idea of the product.
- What are your expansion plans and marketing initiatives for 2019?
As the world is going on a digital platform now, we are trying to get an online portal soon, help the agents to get faster response. We are also trying to establish our presence more, hence planning to open our sales offices in Thailand and Australia.