New Year... New Targets

Sheldon Santwan

As we cruise into 2004 and come upon yet another anniversary of Express Travel & Tourism, a reflection on our achievements over the last year proves that this publication has progressed by leaps and bounds since its relaunch in January 2000. The last 12 months has seen us do industry seminars and conferences, being appointed official publication for TAAI 2003 in Malaysia, signing up to do India’s largest travel and tourism event called World Travel India (WTI) 2004 with an international collaboration with Kinex Log of UK, and of course, we crowned a very successful year with the Galileo-Express Travel & Tourism Awards on December 16, 2003 in New Delhi - the first ever non-governmental awards for the Indian travel and tourism industry. Having said all that, one may ask where do we go from here? Let me assure you that even this is just the tip of the iceberg in the elaborate plan Express Travel & Tourism has drawn up for next couple of years in this industry. We kick it off with WTI to be held next month (February 5-8) in Mumbai, which includes the largest travel exhibition in India and a concurrent high-powered conference programme, which will feature speakers of national and international repute. With the Indian travel and tourism industry today poised for comprehensive take off and being touted as one of the foremost economic drivers of the country in the near future, WTI would form the ideal launching pad as the country’s premier platform to transact tourism business. Most ‘pundits’ in this industry would agree that we are now witnessing a never before surge, both in terms of rate of growth that this industry is witnessing and the maturity and professionalism that has steadily crept into it.

Recognising the evolution and the need to support this new found professionalism, Express Travel & Tourism, along with our industry partners Galileo, instituted awards which in the first edition itself seems to have captured the imagination of the entire travel fraternity in the country. The response, both pre and post event, has been outstanding and the never ceasing phone calls and e-mails of encouragement are only a testimony to the success of this venture. So what does the second edition of these Awards have in store? The 2004 Awards will be even more competitive, new categories added with a concerted effort to ensure that we level the playing field to an extent where it will not be only the very large and established players who bag the awards time after time. The criteria, the nomination forms, the parameters and procedures, the cross section of jury are all being even more finely tuned this year in anticipation of a far greater participation from the industry for the second edition of the Galileo-Express Travel & Tourism Awards 2004. The maturity of these Awards and the constant endeavour to take it to higher levels is totally in sync with the Indian Express Group’s philosophy and the commitment to excellence which we have endeavoured to bring to our various Awards that have been instituted across various industries. The Indian Express Group and the Business Publications Division (which Express Travel & Tourism is a part of) has for many years successfully managed Awards such as the Star Screen Awards which honours excellence in the Indian film industry (Bollywood), the Express Pharma Pulse Awards which recognises outstanding performance in the pharmaceutical industry in India, the Financial Express Best Banks Awards which recognises excellence in the banking and finance industry, Information Technology Awards which are held at our annual Technology Senate organised by Express Computer and Network Magazine (our sister publications on the information technology industry), etc.

This anniversary issue is not only a special landmark in our venture of publishing Express Travel & Tourism but it is also a tribute to the nominees and the award winners of the first edition of these Awards. A closer scrutiny of the issue will reveal the intricate details of the process of these Awards, their transparency and credibility. For a start, all our criteria and parameters for the various categories were vetted by an editorial advisory board, which consists of leading professionals from this industry (a brief profile of each of them has been provided in the following pages). Our research partner, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), is today one of the Big Four accounting firms globally and arguably rated Number One in tourism consultancy worldwide (we have published a detailed corporate profile on them in this issue along with the evaluation criteria that was drawn up for each category of the awards). To back-up this process, we then launched a nation-wide poll among only IATA-accredited travel agents, who voted for their preference across all categories. The relevant information from the nomination forms (objective) and the polling forms (subjective) were then tabulated by Deloitte, with the appropriate weightage, to finally arrive at the winner in each category.

The award nite itself was nothing short of spectacular, with both the ministers Jagmohan (tourism) and Rajiv Pratap Rudy (civil aviation) in attendance along with a host of head honchos from the Indian travel and hospitality industry. So impressive was the turnout that even the forecasted rain stayed away that day... surely a sign of good things to come! And as we truly move forward into this new era of travel and technology, the subscription of Express Travel & Tourism is now available online effective January 1, 2004.

Cheers to good times for tourism and a Happy New Year!