Having been recognised by voters at the World Travel Awards in a number of categories, Breaking Travel News here chats with Gaurav Bhatnagar, co-founder of TBO Group, to find out more about the industry leading company

Breaking Travel News: Congratulations – TBO Holidays has been honoured with the trophies for Middle East’s Leading B2B Travel Portal and South America’s Leading B2B Travel Provider at the World Travel Awards. At the same time, Travel Boutique Online, also part of the TBO Group, has been honoured with the title of India’s Leading B2B Travel Portal. How does it feel to have won?

Gaurav Bhatnagar: It is a great feeling.

We value these awards a lot since these are decided by popular vote.

For us, customer service is a core value and winning these awards is a benchmark against which we can measure how well we are doing!

BTN: How useful are the World Travel Awards when it comes to promoting TBO Holidays around the world?

GB: The World Travel Awards logos and trophies are well recognised in our industry.

These are like the Oscars of the travel industry.

TBO is rapidly expanding into new geographies and new lines of businesses.

These awards serve as our credentials whenever we have to introduce ourselves in a new market.

BTN: This has been a challenging year across the hospitality sector – how has the diversified operation of TBO Holidays allowed it to overcome the impact of Covid-19?

GB: The Covid-19 crisis has obviously been very challenging for us.

However, we have worked hard on converting this difficulty into an opportunity.

We are strong in selling both air and hotel product.

Air business has recovered a bit faster.

Hotels as well have seen pockets of recovery.

Since we operate across the globe, we have benefited as some countries have started to open their lockdowns.

We also used this time to invest into new businesses.

ZamZam is our new joint venture focused on servicing the global Umrah travel market.

We are one of the few authorised online travel agencies who can issue Umrah visas online.

We also launched PAXES, which is a corporate self-booking tool.

We are distributing this tool exclusively thru resellers in various markets across the world.

As corporate travel slowly comes back, saving cost and reducing operations overhead will be critical.

PAXES will play a big role there.

BTN: What do we have to look forward to from the company next year as the recovery continues?

GB: Plenty of action planned for next year!

We have very steep internal goals to pace our recovery at a much faster rate than the overall market recovery.

So we are looking to gain market share – both organically as well as inorganically.

Apart from that, ZamZam and PAXES will scale up and you will see a lot more of those products next year.

Finally, we wish the entire travel industry a speedy recovery from this crisis!

More Information

TBO Holidays is a business-to-business travel portal that allows travel agents to book over 700,000 hotels worldwide in real time.

Backed by cutting edge technology and superior customer support, the company is a one-stop-shop for all holiday booking requirements.

Find out more on the official website.