Lalit Sheth RIP

Lalit Sheth leaped off the Bandra- Worli Sealink to an untimely death yesterday. His decision to end it all comes after a long struggle to keep Raj Travels alive. I knew Lalit bhai well and have chronicled the ups and downs of the travel business for about two decades. In many ways, his passing away seems like a metaphor for the end of the travel agency business as we knew it.

Falling commissions and disintermediation by the internet have changed the game for ever. Dozens of traditional travel agencies all over the country who were never able to find the way out have gone belly up. Even the package tour business that Raj Travels pioneered has changed shape completely. In the travel industry now, startups disrupt the game every few days, and the struggle to adapt is a daily affair.

But it was not always like this. With liberalization in the nineties, came the freedom to buy foreign exchange and foreign travel was suddenly possible for the middle class. New airlines were born making air travel cheaper and travel agents like Lalit bhai saw the huge opportunity to cater to these aspirations. He began with the Gujarati upper-middle-class market that he knew so well. Raj Travels’ packages offering `Aamras in Amsterdam and Puris in Paris’, were a huge hit in Gujarat and Maharashtra, the biggest outbound travel markets at the time. The comfort of familiar food and coaches playing Hindi movies, are easy to scoff at now- but for thousands of families they offered the very first international travel experience.  Raj Travels, SOTC and Cox and Kings were the pioneers in the game. They ensured that plane loads of Indian tourists were able to `do’ Europe and the United States in 12, 16 and 21 day packages.

Lalit bhai was a champion of this market. Every season would begin with loud advertising in the dailies, and tall claims being made and challenged. He began the trend of drawing up charts to compare Raj tours with that of rivals- showing of course, that he offered clients their money’s worth. With his tour company, they also got to play dandia in the Swiss Alps.

Entrepreneurial to the core, he had launched Raj Air, a regional airline that was way before its time in India. The airline got caught up in red tape and he failed miserably in the exercise. A decade later, he launched Raj Express, a luxury bus service that offered clean, reliable connections on busy routes. A sort of IndiGo of the bus industry. He had managed funding from HNIs and some early investors and hoped to scale this up all across western and southern India. But this did not work out, as the entrenched players brought in their political backers to fight their battles. Lalit bhai ran afoul of Raj Thackeray and the MNS, who vandalized his buses. He had to wind down the business eventually.

The landscape kept getting tougher. Local travel agencies all over the country had begun customizing their tours for regional travelers. There was consolidation and the big guns like the Swiss multinational Kuoni and Thomas Cook, with much deeper pockets had moved into the package tourism business nationally. As competition became stiffer and margins thinner, Lalit bhai worked on barter deals with newspapers and continued coming out with the full-page ad campaigns. But debts to suppliers all over the world began mounting.

Insiders in the travel business have known that Raj Travels was in at the deep end. The last straw was troubles with IATA’s billing and settlement plan- agents have to settle their payments to airlines through this system every fortnight. When defaults continued and he was shut out of the IATA system. This would be tough to fix. Yet, Lalit bhai’s ability to deal with tough situations was legendary and everyone felt he would be able to sort it all out. With Wednesday’s leap into the Arabian sea, he proved them all wrong.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.