Holy Voyages Pvt. Ltd.: An Online Travel Platform to make your Religious Journey Possible and Where Travel Meets Spirituality

Spirituality in India has the tightest hold; a number of varied religions find their core existence in the land. Thereby, sacred places are the biggest tourist attraction for believers and worshippers. Holy Voyages Pvt. Ltd. eases your travel to holy places.   Incubated in the year 2010, Holy Voyages.com, an online travel platform provides Religious Tour (Holy Trip) in India & Nepal. The Company is recognized in 2012 when its extended version of the website with paramount information related to 600+ religious spots came live with a granular level of information of various religious sites with all Do’s & Don’ts at those places. It became a Private Limited in the year 2016 because of its humongous glory and recognition. It has emerged as the ‘Best Upcoming Inbound Tour Operators in India’.  

Hailing from Varanasi, Prashant Verma, a software engineer and Santosh Singh, a registered tourist guide, with over 12+ years in the travel industry decided to merge their cumulative experiences and set a new venture in the travel domain. The main reason behind establishing Holy Voyages was to provide pilgrimage focused packages instead of any regular one. To launch a startup in an unfamiliar industry was one of the most difficult things. But the duo did it with the right approach. They leveraged the rich experiences garnered from the tourism industry to understand the requirements of the pilgrims coming for various rituals and were able to acquire more information and converted it into a systematic format and aligning it with the modern web world.  They felt the need to protect & promote their culture.

Also foreseeing the need to aid pilgrims with the required information on each ritual, timings and customized package while ensuring that effective measures were taken to prevent pilgrims from being cheated by unauthorized agents; they established Holy Voyages – a platform for holy trips. Holy Voyages endeavours to connect all the religions to a common platform. Starting with the primary services of arranging purohit and car rental services the company is specialized in rituals, festivals & eco-tourism packages and is the only hub for knowledge & information for pilgrims. Striving to proffer services of high quality combined with enthusiasm & energy, Holy Voyages extends a complete package to its pilgrims starting right from good heritage hotels to stay, flexibility in performing rituals, events & others. The company arranges facilities such as tourist guides in many languages, boat rides, sailing Ganga, Tour Cabs facilities, Priests, Monks, Maulvis for personalized rituals and various preachings or sermons and takes women traveller’s security as the key concern. Acclaimed as DMC & MICE Company at Varanasi, Holy Voyages looks forward to serve pilgrims throughout India with its wide array of offerings such as Ashes Immersion, PindDaan, Rudra Abhishek, Mangala Aarti in Kashi Vishwanath Temple & so on along with acting as a support system for donors with respect to clothes, food & others.

Holy Voyages envisions setting an exemplary change in religious tourism, right from rendering root level information to providing customized packages along with Do’s & Don’ts activities. With an excellent team of IT professionals, content writers, and tour operators, the company has been able to set its branches in Delhi, Bodh Gaya, and Lucknow while having channel partners in Hyderabad, Chennai, Calcutta, Gujarat & other cities.

AN EDGE OVER THE PEERS

Everyone was focusing on selling the package in all those religious places. Very few were focusing on the information. In the name of information they share- Which place to travel? What’s the sightseeing? Which temple to go?, etc. But no one cares  –

• What’s the timing of opening and the closing of the temple? Many people reach at its closing times. Either they miss the Perfect Darshan or have to wait in a long queue to open the temple for darshan again.
• The best time to perform the rituals – Like when to perform Rudrabhisekh? When shardh happens? and What the the exact dates for each pilgrim? and many more…
• How to reach and when to reach for particular rituals/darshan?
• Are there online services to book temples tickets available or not? If yes from where to book. Mostly the temple’s website payment options are down or not worked properly. Many times they didn’t get proper responses from the temple’s call center.
• How to get a priest of their community and local guide of their language? Pilgrims coming from various parts of the country have a little bit difference in the same rituals. Like last rite ritual, “Pind Daan” is performed in more than 50 ways depending on their locality and need.

The best part was that the Company fixed the cost of each ritual, which rarely any tour operator does. This sets the mind of the traveler fixed on a particular budget that he or she has to spend on any ritual. Mostly clients are cheated by local guides or priests as there are no specific charges mentioned for rituals. They can compare hotel and cab costs but where to get the cost of rituals and most of the clients come to religious places for performing rituals or attending darshan or Arti.

THE CLIENTELE ABOUT HOLY VOYAGES

The prodigious clients from varied arenas include Steve Waugh – Former Australian Cricket Captain, O. Panneerselvam – Tamilnadu’s Ex CM family in Varanasi, Mr. Alfanso Ex Tourism Minister with family in Varanasi, Mr. Nand Gopal Nandi -Revenue Minister in  UP Government, Navendu Bhatt- Vice President of Sapient Corporation (now part of Publicis Group), a big IT MLC company with offices in more than 30 countries.

Holy Voyages’ priority is customer satisfaction which is the biggest Mantra to create faith of the travelers in the company. Sometimes they lose money just to retain the trust of the client, but get the return by their references.

Fix cost concept and genuine information of these religious places create a haul of trust. Prashant Verma states, “One NRI client approached and said that whatever price you want to take, please take from me but I want all my last rituals to be pre booked from your company. I have gone through your website and got such good information and feedback that I trust you will do it after my death. It was covered in ZEE NEWS DNA on 16th Sept 19.”

Santosh Singh says, “One client was searching for the details of Varanasi’s information. After going through the website, he gave us a call and said it’s really a mini google for me for data related to Varanasi Ritual’s information. Whatever I am searching for, I am getting on your website page either Rudrabhisek, Mangla Arti, Dev Diwali, Shradh or any other religious information. He not only books for himself, but he gave reference to many of his friends.”

Hard work, the right vision, proper strategy and planning are may be the priorities of your work, but without R&D you will out of the market very soon. This current world is totally technically driven and everyone wants new things, some changes, new features. If you are not aware of the current trend, you are gone. And this can be achieved by R&D only. It may be on your process or new technology or new branch related to your work.

They are working on how smooth can be the process of booking till the end of the tour, and feedback collection can be automated with less scope of error.

They are right now doing R&D for the data collection of local events and local products on each city and highlights those in their portals to make it more fruitful for the traveler.