Dream Destinations

PRIVILEGED Indians looking for a new holiday option this summer will no more have to browse through a coloured  brochure to find the destination of their dreams. Heading their way could be direct video mailers from international resort companies offering exotic destinations from Bora Bora in Polynesia to Cherating in Malaysia or a cruise in the Carribean. With more than 1.5 million Indians travelling abroad each year, the potential to tap the upper-end leisure travel market is enormous and two companies vying with each other to increase their customer base with innovations are Club Med and the Royal Caribbean Cruise company. Says Stephen Mitchie, general manager, Club Med, India: "In the first year of our operations we concentrated on creating a brand awareness. Now we are trying to focus just on potential customers."

As part of the new focus, the company is going on an aggressive marketing spree which will see it spend $300,000 this year, a big chunk of it going towards posting 8,000 video mailers to potential clients— the promotion going through credit card and car finance companies. "Ours is a complicated product and the closest we can come to conveying a sense of what we offer is through a visual treat," says Mitchie. In a similar strategy Club Med carried out in Taiwan, more than 20 per cent of the people who received the video mailer made the decision to travel. Club Med’s inhouse research shows that while people don’t have time to flip through brochures, videos have a more than 90 per cent viewage rate.

Start Living, as Club Med’s new campaign is called, offers a one-price all-inclusive holiday in any of their 120 destinations worldwide. It attracted over 2,000 out-bound Indians last year which it hopes to increase to 4,000 in 1997, with more than 1,200 being sponged from the corporate incentive market. A strategy Discover the World Marketing (DTWM), which markets Royal Carribean Cruise in India, has also turned to. DTWM, which did a marketing promotion of Rs 18 lakh last year spent Rs 3 lakh of that amount on 400-odd videos it mailed to corporate decision makers who had a say in planning employee ince-ntives. Says DTWM CEO Gautam Chaddha: "Our 12-minute film serves as a face-to-face conversation. Writing letters or sending mailers was insufficient in terms of communicating the mood of a cruise."

While last year DTWM took 2,000 people on cruises, the same number as Club Med, they depended mostly on foreign individual travellers. Chaddha plans to make inroads in the corporate incentive market though. In a recent survey that his company did on the incentive habits of 400-odd companies, he noticed a distinctive shift towards structuralising of the incentive. Says he: "Incentives were unstructured earlier. But with the entry of TNCs and the demands on companies to keep the right people, they are searching for the right awards to cope with new aspirational levels. And travel is emerging as a leader amongst incentives."

Last year Club Med took a group of 250 Coca-Cola executives to Phuket and D T W M took group bookings from American Express, Titan and Philips with numbers ranging from two dozen to a 100 from Godrej . Rationalisation of costs has also helped. 30 per cent of D T W M’s clients go for the three-night, four-day cruise in the Bahamas which starts and ends at Miami and touches Nassau and Cococay. At a mere $500 per head. This, of course, excludes the air fare to Miami and back. Says Chaddha: "Cruises are the high point of a family’s holiday. "

A five-day holiday, on the other hand, in five nearby Club Med destinations, Bali, Phuket, Malaysia, Maldives and Mauritius, would cost about Rs 30,000 per head, inclusive of airfare. In June this year, Club Med is adding Bintam in Indonesia to its list of destinations. The added attraction for Indians would be Singapore’s proximity to this tourist resort where they could indulge their passion for shopping.

Chaddha, however, is worried about identifying potential cruise takers. For him, his potential base is people with an annual income of Rs 10 lakh and above and going by an NCAER report he pegs this figure at around 50,000 households. Mitchie at Club Med, though, is looking at the 3.6 million households his research shows are in the Rs 70,000-plus annual earning bracket.

But whichever way the Indians opt to go vacationing, on sea or on land, what’s clear is that a share of their wallet is there for whoever can woo them best.