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Travel companies are now focussing on education tours to drive business. Thomas Cook India, Cox & Kings and Kuoni India have beefed up their offerings in this segment, hoping to tap the growing demand.
"We really had not focused on this segment in a big way, but in the past one year we have seen that this business is booming and there are very few large organised players offering products in this space," said Abraham Alapatt, Chief Innovation Officer, Head Marketing & Customer Service at Thomas Cook India.
Thomas Cook has rechristened its travel and learn business as 'travel quest' and has launched a travel quiz to reach out to schools. The company is spending Rs 2-2.5 crore on media alone and around Rs 5 crore on organising the quiz programme.
Thomas Cook expects to grow around 200-300% in this segment going forward. This however, would be on a low base. As the business matures, the company sees double-digit growth.
"A lot of more progressive schools have mandated travel as part of their curriculum. The old school excursions have now taken on a more educative avatar. It's not just about going on a fun trip but making it quasi educational. Besides the standard things, which comprise of any excursion, it also is about learning social skills, interacting with people and culture," said Alapatt.
What works in favour of these tour operators is that school excursions have been been offered by mom-n-pop shops so far and there is no real focus on building a travel programme that is aligned to curriculum.
The education segement contributes around 45% to Cox and Kings' revenues globally. The rest comes from the leisure segment.
"We are quite bullish about the growth in both the segments. The leisure segment is led by the India business and in the education segment, PGL and Meininger will lead the growth for us on the back of capacity augmentation," said Anil Khandelwal, CFO, Cox & Kings Ltd.
Cox and Kings is present in three education businesses - residential activity centres for school kids; Long haul and short haul tours for school and college kids and youth focused hotels and hostels.
"We are actively working on expanding the education business. We entered the Australian market with PGL in early 2014 with our first centre and are looking to expand further. In addition, we are also looking at increasing capacities at some of our existing centres in UK and also adding new centres. In Meiniger, we currently have 3 hotels signed up which are under construction and we are looking at a healthy pipeline," said Khandelwal.
Kuoni on the other hand has Kuoni Academy with six centers across India in – Mumbai, Delhi (2), Hyderabad, Bhopal and Jabalpur where it offers various short term vocation oriented programs for students.
Alapatt says his company wants to make it big in this space. "We realise that we are relatively late entrant in this space so we are using the quiz we have launched to reach out to 2,500 odd schools. We expect around 1,500 schools to sign on," he says.
Thomas Cook for instance has put together a team for product and sales to develop an itinerary aligned to each standard (from standard 6-9) across the school boards-- CBSE, ICSE and IB.
