When I started Taj Voyages in 2012, the prevailing wisdom was that agents selling a single region were on borrowed time.
The platforms were coming for the easy bookings and after that, for everything else.
They did come for the easy bookings. They got them. What they didn’t get was the work.
Fourteen years on, I sell one region – India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Nepal and Bhutan – and the business is better for having narrowed rather than widened.
That isn’t a sentimental argument about personal service. It’s an argument about product complexity and I think more agents should look at it clearly.
Where the line actually falls
A platform can sell anything that fits in a dropdown. Dates, destination, star rating, price.
Where it struggles is anything where the right answer depends on a sequence of decisions that interact with each other.
India’s luxury trains are the clearest example I know.
There are four – the Maharajas’ Express (below), Palace on Wheels, Golden Chariot and Deccan Odyssey (main image).
Between them they run a limited season with a small number of departures and cabins release six to 12 months ahead.
None of that is the hard part. The hard part is that a train journey is four to eight days inside a two- or three-week trip and it has to be sequenced against everything else.
Fly a client into Delhi two days before a departure and you’ve wasted two days of their holiday. Fly them in the night before and one delayed connection costs them the entire journey.
The train determines the itinerary. The itinerary cannot be built around the train afterwards.
A booking engine cannot hold that. It can sell a cabin. It cannot tell you the cabin is the wrong one, in the wrong week, at the wrong end of the trip.
That is where our value sits now – not in access, which the platforms have, but in sequence.
A structural note worth sharing
One other thing I’d offer, because it comes up rarely and I think it should come up more.
We run two brands under one ATAS accreditation: Taj Voyages for South Asia, and Round the World for cruising and extended global itineraries.
One accreditation, one set of obligations, two quite different propositions to two quite different markets.
For a small agency that has outgrown one identity but can’t justify two businesses, it’s a structure worth understanding.
It keeps each brand legible – a client looking for a Sri Lanka specialist finds a Sri Lanka specialist, not a generalist with a Sri Lanka page – while compliance and the back office stay single.
To any agent considering narrowing
The fear is obvious: fewer destinations, fewer enquiries. In practice the opposite happened and the reason is unglamorous.
When you sell one region you learn things that cannot be looked up – which hotel has changed hands and declined, which road is genuinely four hours rather than two, which permit takes three weeks in practice rather than the 10 days the website claims.
That knowledge compounds. It is also the only thing in this business a platform cannot buy, scrape or replicate.
The travellers who still want an agent are not the ones looking for a cheaper flight.
They are the ones planning something expensive and complicated enough that getting it wrong matters. There are fewer of them than there were. They are worth considerably more.
Vishnu Daram is managing director of Taj Voyages, an ATAS-accredited (A12208) South Asia specialist based in Sydney.
