In a bid to encourage and increase Indian travellers to post hotel reviews, holiday information travel portal HolidayIQ aims to cover 5000 hotels pan-India under its recently launched programme ‘hiq!PAD’ by April 2015. The pilot project was started in Goa a month ago. As per the programme, HolidayIQ will offer a device, ‘hiq!PAD’ to the hotels wherein the guests can post their reviews. Elaborating on the programme, Hari Nair, Founder and CEO, HolidayIQ, said, “hiq!PAD is an acronym for
‘holiday inspired quote’. So ‘to hiq! It’ means to write a review of one’s vacation. We aim to cover 5000 hotels at 50 destinations across the country. The hotels will be mainly mid-market and budget hotels. The cost of installation of device per hotel is between Rs 15,000 - Rs 20,000. On an average we look at covering 100 hotels at each destination. Goa being the pilot project we aim to complete 100 hotels in Goa by March 2013 and are targetting to complete 1000 hotels by April 2014 and, remaining hotels in the next 12 months. We shall pick the top 50 destinations visited by Indian travellers.”
In order to offer support to hotels in terms of software and other activities, HolidayIQ will have marketing team based at each of these 50 destinations. Currently, HolidayIQ has 15 sales offices in India. Once the guests post hotel review, the same will be immediately uploaded on HolidayIQ website. The reviews will be centrally controlled by HolidayIQ and the hotels can’t tamper with the information. In case, the guests post a negative comment about the hotel, HolidayIQ will send a sms to the general manager of the hotel, intimating about the same.
Nair stated, “The hotel will not bear any cost, however, the hotel is required to put in quality time and efforts. It will hardly take a minute of the guest to post the review. But hotels need to be proactive in encouraging guests to give their reviews/feedback at the time of checking out. Through this programme, we want to reach mass Indian domestic travellers, who are looking at quality information to decide on their travel plans”.
“We want to be market leader in offering meaningful and relevant information to the India traveller. Besides, we are also looking at increase our audience base, which is currently five million. We are also working on mobility strategy and address language related issues,” he added.