Enhancing the Indian experience for travellers

It was while travelling to USA in 2014 that Harish Khatri saw a lot of excitement about travelling to India but there was still this nagging factor persisting among travellers: whether India was safe for tourists. To understand their apprehensions, he started researching on what support was available if a tourist gets into a distress situation. And to his surprise, there was none. After returning to India, he discussed this idea with few people, and everyone was of the opinion that there is a huge gap in the market. By mid-2015, Khatri, one of the founding members of Group M ESP, and his team started working on this project. “We identified a serious gap in the current travel and tourism landscape, that of security and active assistance and found a serious lack of a centralised system that could provide foreigners in India with verified information and trusted assistance. We conceptualised and launched India Assist with a vision to ‘bridge the gap and enhance the Indian experience for travellers’,” says Khatri, Founder and Managing Director, India Assist Insights Pvt Ltd.  

“At the core of India Assist is empathy and this is a guiding force behind the development of the product. Every service, action and initiative, focusses on benefitting the tourist in terms of making their life easy while they travel. This has ensured that we created a world class product, a product which we would want to use ourselves as travellers,” adds Khatri who started off his professional career in the fashion industry and ex-Vice President, IPL’s Deccan Chargers. 

On when did the travel and tourism sector catch his fancy, Khatri says, “The moment we pack our bags, we become travellers. It means even though I wasn’t a part of the travel and tourism industry, I have always been a big-time traveller. India Assist has been developed from a traveller’s point of view as this is what we don’t get when we travel. The journey has been tough beyond imagination as there was no template available on what we were trying to build and then I didn’t have a tech or travel industry background. To top it all, I didn’t have enough money to create such a world-class tech which could be patented later! The challenges were immense, but God has been kind that we could keep surpassing all of them. India Assist provide real time assistance through dedicated personnel - a human connection backed by state-of-the-art technology, and that is what most customers appreciate. We are constantly working on adding more services to our product basket. We intend to add a variety of hyperlocal services on a city level that showcase the unique flavour and offerings of the city itself.” 

India Assist provides assistance by providing verified information over call and eases the life of a traveller by allocating personnel to them at their live location anywhere in the cities of India and Nepal. Intending to fulfill traveller’s need of experiencing a hassle and stress-free vacation, India Assist is there to help and guide them towards the right solution with on ground emergency service whenever and wherever they want; emergency services including medical, theft, loss, altercation or any urgent/ critical requirement as also support in cab booking, dining out, shopping, foreign exchange. All these are available 24x7. 

The assistance service provided by Indian Assist is available through an inbuilt India Assist app which will be recommended to you from your travel agent, hotel or airlines as it is available to the end customer through a B2B model. “We sell our packages to industry stakeholders, and it will get passed on to the end consumer from them. All industry stakeholder in any case wants an assistance service for their own customers and they may give you the service as complementary or at some nominal cost, depending upon their own business strategy,” Khatri informs, adding that a code will be given as and when the India Assist service is sold to a client who then can download the app using that code. “In case of assistance, they can use it simply by pressing the alert buttons on the app. The location of the traveller can be tracked and a trained India Assist service provider will be assigned. Based on assistance protocol for each situation, the ground personnel will extend all support so that the traveler feels at ease with the situation. In addition, the App provides Meet & Greet Service, wherein tourists can opt for pick and drop service from any of the point of arrival within the city like the airport, train station and bus terminals, to their point of destination escorted by our on-ground team to ensure their safe travel at odd hours,” he shares. 

India Assist, in near future, aims to build an eco-system for Indian travellers travelling in India. “We wish to become the valuable and reliable sources for the travellers and guide them in case of any assistance required by them. By year-end, we should be present in more than 100 cities across India. In longer run, we want to be a global player and as a traveler, our service should be available at prime tourist countries. We also intend to add a variety of hyperlocal services on a city level that showcase the unique flavour and offerings of the city itself,” he concludes.