THE THINKING CAP - Inspiring Women series- IV

Today on THE THINKING CAP- Inspiring Women series, we meet with two women who transformed their love of travel into a portal with Indian travellers headed to Europe in mind.

This post is by Prerna Uppal, a London-based freelance writer. Prerna is currently lending her prose to help raise funds for charity and exploring the world of fiction writing. A post-graduate in communication studies, she has reported for The Week, The Indian Express and CNN-IBN. You can read more of her writing here.

Northward Bound

I don’t know about you but I, like many people, thought that the Lonely Planet was the last word in travel literature. Till I met Chetna Prakash and Sakshi Ojha and learnt of their recently launched online venture called Indian Compass.  The website’s tagline reads –Directing Indians around Europe like no guidebook can. A tall claim, may be, but one that is full of promise and for good reason.

Indian Compass is a one stop portal for all travel needs of Indians headed towards Europe. Unlike guidebooks like the Lonely Planet which caters to a general market, Indian Compass deciphers European travel for Indians, who as the owners point out, have different sensibilities and travel needs than western travellers. And the website takes care to address all possible issues that travellers can face.

Behind the conception & launch of Indian compass are two well-travelled individuals. London-based Chetna and Sakshi’s passion for travel was fuelled the year they began their Erasmus Mundus programme. The two year scholarship was based in Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. During the time they made sure they travelled all over Europe and experience the continent with its good and the bad.

Between the two of them, they tried everything from backpacking to budget travel to more conventional type of travelling. This was in 2008. Over these last few years, they have put together quite a repository of information and useful anecdotes. These include their stories as well as of some other well-travelled contributors.

While their experiences add credibility to what they write and recommend, that’s not all. They are seasoned journalists who write extensively about travel in leading publications, and they have been there done that when it comes to travel. But they wanted to do more.

“Most publications guide books and websites (at least in India) tell you what to do. No one addresses the practical issues that crop up before and during travel,” Chetna says. She goes on to give me an example. “They (publications) will tell you how Croatia is a beautiful destination but say nothing of the visa hassles you can encounter, for a reason as simple as the fact that Croatia is not a Schenghen visa country.”

The website is simple in design and user friendly. Its pages are helpfully divided into sections like, travel, paperwork & practicalities, accommodation, experiences, etc. Here you can access fuss free and practical advise culled from personal experience of writers.

The writing is simple and content too the point, but never in a pedantic tone. And this is a very conscious choice the dynamic duo made.

“We had decided at the onset that we will never have a top-down approach in this website. While we do consider ourselves an authority about what we offer, we are always open to discussion,” Sakshi explains.

And interactivity is at the heart of the site’s operations. It is an open platform for discussion by all, where visitors are welcome to share their experiences. And even ask for what they want to see on the website. It hopes to reach out to many more audiences via social media forums like Facebook and Twitter, a task which the two rightly point will take time.

But if one was to look at figures, the site has the potential of enjoying a very large audience.  Currently there are 9 million out-bound travellers from India out of which 40% are headed to visit Europe. This, Chetna tells me, is from European Travel Commission report. The total number of Indian tourists, the report adds, is set to reach 50 million by 2020. You can do the math.

The reason most compelling was to break the usual “do this, head here” formula and help the Indian traveller enjoy travel the way it is to be enjoyed – by exploration; be it of the place, culture, cuisine and people.

By sharing their writers’ travel experiences, the website hopes to spare travellers some anxiety that travel and its planning can bring on. This, they hope, will help visitors be better prepared for travel and more at ease at their holiday destination.

And it gets better. These two are not so arrogant to proclaim that they know everything there is to know about travelling in Europe. They admit there is good stuff out there on the internet. So what they do is peruse the www and bring to their visitors websites/blogs/links useful to plan a successful trip. In other words, they do the hard-work for any Indian looking at European travel.

The way forward for them right now is to attract a larger audience. They want to eventually bring European service providers and Indian customers within reachable distance of each other. This is also to generate money to sustain the website. The latter while important will not dictate the editorial policy of the website. For them credibility matters and that’s where the journalistic ideals kick in. “We need the money to sustain the business but that doesn’t mean our work will be biased towards sponsors,” Sakshi iterates. “And given the medium we have chosen to work in, it’s not possible. Internet is quite an honest and ruthless playground,” Chetna adds.

And these two are not afraid to play the game. Instead of moping about a bad economy and waiting for the right job to come to them, Sakshi and Chetna chose to become pioneers instead. They discovered an untapped market and utilised their collective skills and experience to create an opportunity for themselves (and their writers). For these two, every challenge is a chance to grow and learn. And for these reasons and more, the compass does seem to point North for the young entrepreneurs.    

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Team First Feather: We are truly inspired by these travel entrepreneurs and wish the Indian Compass all the best!

Do you know of anyone who inspires you to put your first creative feather in your cap? Hold on to that thought!

Submission to the ‘Inspiring Women’ Series is closed, but we’ll be announcing a new topic on March 28^th!

Remember that 35 of the best entries from the overall submissions to the blog on different topics will be selected and compiled into an e-book to be released in April 2012.

So join us on FB or drop us a mail at firstfeather.consultants(@)gmail.com to catch the new topics as soon as they are announced!

We’ll be back with the last post on the Inspiring Women series tomorrow!