‘We Offer Professional Services For FIT Travellers, Incentive Groups Or The MICE Segment’

TourEast, an established regional destination management company and inbound services leader from the Far-East, recently conducted a road show across Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. In an exclusive interview Dennis Choo, managing director, Tour East group of Companies, talks to Raadia Mukadam about the companies vision and strategy to capture the Indian outbound market. Excerpts.

Why did you decide to hold a road show in India?

The Indian outbound market has been bursting at its seams. Viewing this exponential growth, we have also tried to milk the potential of this market. Besides Mumbai and Delhi we took the road show to south India because new airports set up in Hyderabad and Bangalore have increased flights from these sectors, which has made a tremendous difference to the outbound traffic to the far-east. Though our presence in India is not completely new, as we have been travelling with Singapore Tourism Board on their road shows in the past, but we are now looking at establishing an office in India in the year 2004.

Why should the Indian tour operator buy from Tour East?

We offer a comprehensive range of services that our competitors cannot compare against. Whether you have needs as a FIT traveller, an incentive group, or a convention, we can offer you the privileges of these professional services. For execution of every detail we promise to deliver, we have experienced managers with access to our vast resource and logistics to guarantee a memorable time for all. With our size and network contacts, we have secured the luxury of the best hotels for every price tier. And with a computerised hotel inventory, we assure one of the fastest access to availability, and instantaneous confirmations.

What sets your company apart from the competition?

As a company, we bring forth exciting travelogues featuring the charm of the exotic east. We bank on the wealth of experience from 27 years in the region, and a deep understanding of Asia. The strength of our group is the ownership of its fleet of state of the art vehicles, ensuring a smooth-as-silk running of land transport needs. With a dedicated team of over 450 highly experienced travel and multilingual experts, we have built up an extensive knowledge-base of our destinations with a passion that will see further development in our travel programmes. Besides that the integration of Holiday Tours and Travel and the Tour East Group has made the company a more compact and efficient organisation. We continually invest in the latest state of the art technologies to offer efficient and effective delivery of services and products to clients. One of our main focus is on the upcoming launch of a full-fledged electronic distribution system. The Indian tour operator should explore the colours of Asia with us because our mission is to provide a highly innovative, qualitative and personalised service to their clients to ensure a memorable holiday experience.

How wide-spread is your set up?

We have a wide array of strategic set ups in all parts of the East that include Thailand, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. So we can stay in touch with all our partners and their clients to ensure that the highest service standards are maintained. We have learnt through the pages of time how to handle every traveller’s need. Including client profiles like wholesalers, tour operators, incentive houses, travel agents, cruise lines and airlines. We even have special MICE department to address different client aspects in a host of city centres.

Are you also catering to the MICE market?

We have a team of experts earmarked to handle the Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Conferences and Exhibitions segment. We have trained them in the science and art of hotel reservations, theme events, sightseeing tours, special interest tours, pre and post tours, meeting and seminar organisation, as well as the running of a secretariat service centre.