‘HT Destinations’ – Travel Fair : Not much to miss

Visting travel fairs should be in my syllabus so today morning, we dashed to ‘HT Destinations’, touted as a travel fair. This was not the first such fair under ‘HT Destinations’ and I remember seeing quarter page advts in the home-publication ‘Hindustan Times’. The last one happened as soon as March,11 so it is not something once-a-year event. I am guessing that HT is hoping to grow it and scale it up to a large level with possibly a lot of financial-transactions happening.

Coming back to this one.

Venue – The Park, Cannaught Place
Dates – Sep 17, 18, 2011

‘The Park’ is very centrally located so that is good. More importantly, you get a valet service and that is a big big plus since you do not have to get into any parking hassle. Here is the location map.


View Hotel in Delhi, The Park New Delhi in a larger map

It was hosted in a medium size banquet hall at first floor. There was a reception desk and ‘Kingdom of Dreams’ was giving away a ticket to their bollywood nautanki jangoora every couple of hours.

There are some sofas to relax and to plan your holiday options once you had to chance to get in and look at various offerings.

As you enter the hall, you see a very big stall by ‘Cox and Kings’. They had enough people to attend to, small round tables and polite and intelligent staff to answer your travel queries.

HT Destinations Sep 2011
HT Destinations Sep 2011
HT Destinations Sep 2011

There were about 10-12 holiday package providers in all and since it was a little early in the day, there was not much rush.

Apart from Cox and Kings, there were some of the Delhi based players like Dewan Holidays, Thomas Cook and few others.

From the state level tourism bodies, I could only find ‘MP Tourism’. Being a great fan of MP and MP Tourism, I stopped by and picked up a jungle package and was surprised to see a figure or INR 18,950. When I enquired about the details, it was a 3 nights all inclusive package for one person. That didn’t seem right and the gentleman who was manning the booth didn’t see well informed so we moved on.

HT Destinations Sep 2011
HT Destinations Sep 2011

We spent some time at ‘Cox and Kings’ and they were offering a INR 1K discount if you book there but overall I didn’t see any great discounts/packages being offered there, or something special which you do not see at their websites. Also the number of players were small. I am hoping that in future, they are able to have a bigger one so that one can find some surprise destinations (in India, outside India) which one is not usually familiar with. In its current avatar, 1 hour would be enough to cover all of it.

HT Destinations Sep 2011

If you have an immediate travel plan and have a destination in mind, say in next one month or so, and are looking at comparing three-four providers and are willing to make a decision then ‘HT Destinations’ would be helpful, else there was not much.

I would try to visit the next installment and report back on how it is evolving. If you want me to look for a specific thing, do leave a comment.

If you have missed this one, then do not worry because there was not much to miss.

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