PUTTING FOREIGN TRAVELLERS AT EASE IN INDIA

Two avid travellers, Harish Khatri and Moqierish Tak, set out to make India a shining tourist destination by launching a tech enabled platform called India Assist. Over 10 million tourists, who visit India every year, face several problems due to lack of centralised mechanism to get verified assistance in case of distress.

THE BIG IDEA

Speaking about the initiative, Harish Khatri, Founder, India Assist Insights, says, “Our primary goal is to ensure that foreign travellers have an enriching and incredible experience during their visit to our country. We provide assistance by providing verified information over call and ease any distress caused during travelling by allocating personnel to them at their live location anywhere in Delhi-NCR.” With the number of arrivals growing yearon- year, this is a market worth USD 28 billion.

FRANCHISE MODEL

India Assist is now looking at a franchising model to take its services to cities having an international airport with high foreign tourist influx. At a micro level, India Assist aims to expand into cities like Mumbai, Jaipur, Agra, among other metros. It aims to have ground personnel within 5 km radius within the operational cities to be able to provide services in the least amount of time.

Highlighting the franchise selection criteria, Khatri says, “The channel partner has to be capable to service the tourists and have the resource and capital to build an infrastructure to service the needs of foreign tourists travelling to India.”

Elaborating about revenue sharing with franchisees, he says, “It’s 80-20% sharing structure where 20% of revenue earned is kept by India Assist and the rest is passed on to the channel partner. ” He adds that the franchise model is asset-light with no inventory and low-investment requirements.

“Being a low investment opportunity, the company claims break-even in 12-18 months. The franchise business is expected to deliver high RoI of over 450% in the next 5 years. That’s why it has been considered as an opportunity of the year,” concludes Khatri.

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