Via starts luxury service to tap pilgrim mart

Via, a travel company, has entered the pilgrimage market with a fleet of four Volvo buses. The company aims to operate 1,000 Volvo buses in the next two years.

“We don’t follow the crowd, but follow need,” said Vinay Gupta, CEO, Via earlier known as Flightraja.com.

While leisure travel makes up about 35 per cent of the Indian travel market, the rest of the internal travel market is cornered by the pilgrim market. That’s the market that Via is now seeking to tap, and it wants to attract the middle classes that want to travel in comfort while on a pilgrimage, he said.

This market, till now made of unorganised players, is being elevated into an organised one by Via which aims to consolidate them by bringing them onto a common platform. With each bus costing over Rs 1.1 crore, on the acquisition of the buses alone there will be an expenditure of over Rs 1,100 crore.

The company aims to invest close to Rs 1,500 crore over the next two years. But, much of the expenditure will happen on the part the company’s partners i.e. the bus operators.

Beginning with the Volvo multi-axle bus services from Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad to Tirupati, the company seeks to take its operations to other regions in the next few months. The company, which has been providing travel services at wholesale rates to customers, has now extended the same to pilgrimages too, he said.

While a person travelling on his own may end up spending about Rs 2,500 or even more for a similar service, the company offers to provide a package for just Rs 1,450 for weekdays and Rs 1,650 for weekends, Gupta said.

He said the company would introduce four buses in December and eight buses in in January. Via operates in India through a network of 20,000 partner stores across 2,400 cities and towns.

Via, founded by Vinay Gupta and Amit Aggarwal in July, 2006, was incorporated in May 2007.

In 2007, Via received a funding of $5 million from NEA IndoUS Ventures. In 2010, Sequoia Capital had closed a $10 million infusion of funds into Via’s holding company FlightRaja Travels.