Pilgrims show up on Lalu's radar screen

For a better part of his political career, Lalu Prasad was known best as a street smart politician and nothing else. He could play the political game well and had endeared himself to the masses, though he failed to make a mark as an administrator.

Things took a turn for the better once he took over as the railway minister in the Manmohan Singh government four years back. Since then, he has improved the performance of the Indian Railways beyond recognition, shored up its finances, given low-cost airlines a run for their money and taken the challenge from truck and bus owners head on.

Next, Indian Railways has decided to cash in on the boom in pilgrimage tourism. Tour operators need to watch out for this latest salvo from Prasad's armoury.

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), an arm of the Indian Railways, started its pilgrim packages to locations like Vaishno Devi, Puri, Rishikesh, Shirdi etc and runs a total of 76 tour packages to other locations like Jaipur, Jammu & Kashmir, Goa, Bangalore, Pune and Kanyakumari, among others.

Customers who take this package need not worry about rail travel, road transport, hotel accommodation, meals and sightseeing. All of it is taken care of by the IRCTC at a price, of course.

Pilgrims account for almost 40 per cent of domestic Indian tourists. It only made sense to ratchet this business into something big. "Our tour packages to religious locations like Vaishno Devi, Tirupati, Puri and Shirdi have generated huge interest among domestic tourists and we have decided to scale up our services in these areas," said IRCTC Managing Director Nalin Shinghal.

It tasted big time success only in January 2007 when it launched the Vaishno Devi package to Jammu from New Delhi, which was an immediate sellout. For this, IRCTC has tied up with a hotel at the shrine, where customers can stay. They are given food on board as well as off board. The hotel also provides local transport for additional sightseeing etc. All these services just cost Rs 3,950 per person for three nights and four days.

The service, IRCTC officials claim, has been 90 per cent sold out. The company now plans to convert this package into a daily package from Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai. It has also decided to make available this tour package from more cities like Ahmedabad, Indore, Lucknow, Secunderabad and Kolkata from next month.

Similarly, the Tirupati tour package, which was launched in January 2008, has generated good response from pilgrims, and now IRCTC plans to make available this service from Delhi and Kolkata, apart from the daily service that is currently available from Chennai, Secunderabad, Mumbai, Bangalore and Vijayawada.

Also on the cards is a high-decibel publicity campaign to make these packages more popular among customers. A campaign involving danglers and posters at IRCTC stalls and food plazas as well as scrolls on religious TV channels, spots on FM Radio, newspapers, displays at metro stations etc is being launched.

"Our main target is the mid-segment customers and these services will provide great convenience to them at affordable cost", added Shinghal.

So how are other tour operators managing their service and attracting customers when IRCTC tour packages are becoming more popular?

Mudit Khosla, founding general manager, Yatra.Com, a travel portal, said, "Since the target customers of IRCTC is the mid-segment customers and that of travel portals are high end customers, we don't see any possible business threat from them. On the other hand, IRCTC has really helped in creating a category of customers who are now going for a whole package comprising of end to end service, which in the long run will help other tour operators also."