RARE: Bevy of Untouched Locus!

In an interaction with BW Hotelier, Shoba Mohan, founder of RARE India talked about how sustainability should be the criteria based on which people choose hotels and stay instead of a luxury. RARE is dedicated to giving their clients an experience hard to forget. They ensure they point the difference between a memorable vacation and a holiday. Albeit, ‘it’s about the people.’

WITH THE belief of ‘Creating Shared Value’, RARE aims at curating unique and inclusive experiences for stay and exploration that responsibly impacts the community, traveller and destination. It offers its clients a variety of unexplored and ‘rare’ places by acting as an advocate to small, private, independently run unique properties and theme-based hotels. Established in 2004, Rare India has successfully revolutionised the travel industry.

In an interaction with BW Hotelier, Shoba Mohan, founder of RARE India talked about how sustainability should be the criteria based on which people choose hotels and stay instead of a luxury. RARE is dedicated to giving their clients an experience hard to forget. They ensure they point the difference between a memorable vacation and a holiday. Albeit, ‘it’s about the people.’

During the tete-a-tete, she informed, “In the beginning, international clients constituted 90% of their room nights. But, as of now, it’s a slightly varying percentage; it fluctuates between 60% international clients and 40% domestic.”

“For hotels which are located in the boondocks, which are unexplored and unknown to most, international travellers are still their target clienteles,” she further added.

Being a B2B (Business to Business) company, it reaches out to the tour operators who help them in promoting their hotels; not only in the Indian Market but also in the international market. Talking about their expansion plans, she said, “Our next step is to go online and become a review based online platform and allow people to book through us.” Adding more to this, she said, “I always believe it’s the agency market that can talk effectively and efficiently about property like ours and help us grow in the competition, because it does not conform with the standard 5-star hotels, which makes it important for people to know, ‘why are they paying top bucks for a rural experience.’

The hotels in the RARE collection are duly audited for sustainability, green values and community impact. Talking about sustainability, she said, “The onus of sustainability lies with hoteliers. Sitting in the rare and remote locations, we do ensure the longevity of untouched heritage, culture along with employment, livelihood development, skilling workers, and healthcare, education and job opportunities in the local community.” Furthermore, she added, “We, as a country, are very bad at self-regulation. There are several places in the country which are facing the problem of over-tourism; this needs immediate attention, we have to use the medium to aware and educate people.”

When asked about challenges in the journey, Mohan said, “It’s been a long journey, I’ve met and worked with hoteliers. I’ve learned a lot along the way. As of now, the business has been changing and we’ve to constantly re-invent ourselves, so the change is inevitable.”


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