Women on Wanderlust: Here's a travel club of, for and by ladies

Amarpreet Kaur, a 52-year-old homemaker from Jammu, took her first international vacation last year to South Africa with a group of women she had never met before. “Once my children settled to their own way of life, I thought it was a good time to take time off for myself and do what I wanted to do for some time,” she says. Kaur went to South Africa as part of Women on Wanderlust(WoW), a women’s only travel club that organizes trips to different destinations world-over and in the bargain empowers women allowing them to experience life out of their comfort zones. WoW is the brainchild of Sumitra Senapaty, 54, who gave up a career as an established freelancewriter with publications like Times of India and India Today to start a venture of her own, WoW in June 2005.

Inspiring her was a group of solo women travelers she met on an assignment to New Zealand, who were part of a women’s travel club. The idea of replicating this in India stayed with her long after that assignment.

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Not run-of-the-mill
“I spoke to my family about it every weekend and it came to a point where they wanted to hear no more. I realized if I don’t try, I would not know if it would work,” says Senapaty whose lustfor adventure began early - an army background made growing up exciting thanks to her father’s numerous postings across India. “I was exposed to travel from a young age…it never intimidated me,” she recalls.

Senapaty did not envision WoW to be a run-of-the-mill travel company. She tells us that she chose Leh and Ladakh, a not-so-popular location then, for the first trip eight years ago. Since then, WoW has taken 3,000 women on 300 trips to 50 destinations globally.

“The concept was so unique…I never had to employ any public relations agency for marketing,” she declares. From signup to the port-of-arrival, WoW handles everything. And the personal attention to detail starts from the enquiries. “Scores of people call in and mail. We givepersonal attention and reply to all mails,” Senapaty claims.

WoW curates four kinds of holidays - a regular Indian trip, an outdoors-oriented one, an international one, and the WoW Signature trip which Senapaty describes as epic journey of a lifetime. “These are niche, more expensive, and meant for people who want comfort with in-depthtravel,” she explains. For example, signature trips in the offing are Iceland in December 2013 to see the Northern lights and one to Rwanda to spot Gorillas in 2014.

Packages start from Rs 19,000 and can go up to Rs 5-6 lakh depending on the location and nature of a trip, most often excluding cost of tickets. Travelers have the option of booking their own tickets to the destination or a transit point. A fully planned itinerary with packing and otherinstructions is released seven days before the trip.

Itineraries are followed to the tee but are also designed to give travelers some free time to do their own thing. “It’s not like a school trip with a teacher blowing her whistle,” quips Senapaty.

A normal day would entail sightseeing with a local guide employed by WoW, lunch and an open second half to explore spots themselves.

For women, by women
More than an alternate social platform for women or an ’extended pajama party’ as Senapaty describes the experience, WoW, she says, has become an attractive place to work with applications from architects, chartered accountants and IT professionals pouring in by the dozen.

Senapaty does not entertain most of these requests as she’s certain this crop won’t fit in. A job like this is more about aptitude and personality than qualifications, she feels. “It can make or break a trip.” Her training revolves around people skills and communication.

The company employs only women and Senapaty prefers taking freshers from tourism institutes, rather than the travel trade. “It is difficult to get people with industry experience to unlearnthings. They are taught to tell white lies. We tell our people to be transparent.”

A former marketing consultant, Archana Rathi, 37, joined WoW in March 2013 as a Senior Travel Consultant. She has supervised three trips and is taking one to the Andamans in December 2013.Sharing her observations, Rathi says “WoW is a confidence booster. Women lose all inhibitions and come back making a few best friends.”

Groups are usually a cosmopolitan mix of urban, well-educated women who are single by choice. There are those with families, many even from smaller towns. Senapaty says that by her estimates,there are five million women in India, who are yet to discover WoW.

Come January 2014, she’s launching a city membership scheme for women who cannot be part of WoW due to constraints. With this, women can meet locally over an occasion or for activities together, believes Senapaty.

This article first appeared in Entrepreneur India magazine