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Anatomy of an Architectural Tour

We have been curating and planning architectural students tours over the past 2 decades and in this time the number of Architectural colleges have grown exponentially. It will be interesting to study the size of this market in terms of tours, competitors etc. We haven't come across this specific segment level analysis but we have many other learnings over time.  In this blog we try to articulate the anatomy of an Architectural tour, its different stakeholders and the impact these have in the overall experience.  Stakeholder 1 - The students Young and energetic and eager to explore, probably stepping out of the shadows of their parents and families for the first time. Their imagination of travel to a destination is derived from popular culture and Instagram. They don't know exactly what to expect but invariably these tours remain memorable for a long time.  Stakeholder 2 - The faculties and the management A destination is picked and finalised with an agenda that adds value to th

Planning, organizing and coordinating an Architectural students tour

 We recently had the opportunity to organise a tour for the 7th semester students of Architecture from Manipal College. The group was travelling to Goa to case study students housing. We got on board as a travel consultant just a week before their scheduled arrival in Goa.  Some of the larger campuses in Goa are  Goa Institute of Management, designed by Ar.Brinda Somaya |  https://www.gim.ac.in/ BITS Goa campus by Ar. Hafeez Contractor |  https://www.bits-pilani.ac.in/goa/ NIT Goa New Campus, still under construction |  https://www.nitgoa.ac.in/   Within a week we had to get permissions to visit these campuses, plan the logistics and prepare a daily scheduling. 7 days may seem a lot of time to put this all together but we were under pressure because our scchedule was depended on these permissions and we were anxiously awaiting an affermative reply from the administrative department of these campuses. After all the students were traveling all the way to Goa only for these case studeis. 

Heritage as a tool of development

 The collective wisdom of the society in what it decides to keep and what it decides to discard is facinating. People of diverse backgrounds with different lived experiences accept certain aspects of history while discarding the rest. The role of politics, popular culture, patriarchy and the macro economic situation all have to be factored in understanding these decisions.   Heritage thrives on recoginition and these recoginitons are perosonal and also as a society. In todays context of tourism and its impact on the economy, heritage becomes a very important tool in development.  In this blog we dwell upon this thread - "heritage as a tool of development." to understand Heritage as well as how it will help in development  Last year post the Pandemic while the whole world began traveling again, some 78 lakh people visited the louvre Museum in Paris. This is one Museum and it is emphasised here because of the next statistic that we present to you. In the entire state of Goa in

The Creator Economy and the dilemas of a small travel company

 When we started of, we were entirely focused on developing travel programs and executing them to the best of our capacity. Then of course there were compliances and processes that we learnt from scratch accounting, book keeping, data collection, marketing, sales calls etc. We never really grasped the posibilites of the internet and the opportunities it would open up. But then who could have? And can we really predict what the landscape of the internet would be in the next 10 years? We are now continuosly bogged down by the pressure of posting content on our different social media channels and they seem to growing by the dozen.  There are many theories and suggestions on how to use the social media to your advantage but over the years we still have not cracked this nut.  We have been told to consistently post content, we have been decently good at this consistency but none of our content got any traction.  We learnt that we have to use the hashtags very cleaverly, but again we have bee