Weaving Wanderlust Dreams Made Easy

Amidst the metro’s hustle and bustle, the stiff competition and regular deadlines lurking above our heads, it is natural to plan for a vacation to not only detox the tired soul, but also to spend quality time with our loved ones. But due to lack of finance, how many of us can actually implement our dream holiday of an Europe tour or watching the Aurora borealis unveil itself before our very eyes? According to statistics, due to limited financing options, approximately 35 per cent of travellers do not go on a vacation.

SanKash, a Fintech company, is in the business of making your travel dreams come true. It leverages technology to provide customised travel loans to the customer. The customer does not need to have a credit card or go for a personal loan. Founded on April 1, 2018  by Akash Dahiya, Abhilasha Negi and Manu Pal, the company took seven months to develop technology, operation, team building and partnerships. The first loan was disbursed on October 15, 2018. Sankash now has 75 travel partners who are offering EMI solution at 87 Point of sales though their 220 agents spread across 23 cities in India. It has signed up with B2B travel aggregators like Travel Boutique Online to offer this service to their 30,000 travel and tour operators across India. Having started with one NBFC, SanKash now has three financial institutions backing its lending book.

While a traveller can only apply for a loan, the onus of offering the loan option lies with the travel agent or the tour partners. The travel package amount must be within Rs5,000-2,00,000 and the amount can either be your total trip value or partial trip value. As a basic step, when the customer engages with the travel agent for designing their travel itinerary or for booking the tickets, the latter needs to inform of the option to pay in installments even after the trip is taken, thereby ridding the customer of the hassle of looking for a separate loan for the travel. The travel partners sell flights, vacation packages, hotels and cruises and other ancillary products and travel purchases.

Seeking a  request, the travel partner sends the SanKash link to customer’s email id, thus beginning the digital application process by clicking on that link. Here are the steps;

1  Customer selects the product like per cent amount of trip value they want to take, tenure to repay

2  He furnishes basic personal and occupational details, uploads KYC documents and submits application

3  The decision of approval is instantly delivered to travel agent who then books ticket on behalf of the customer

4  Post approval, the customer makes down payment, receives complete repayment instruction for EMI and confirms the tenure of loan before submitting

5  On submission, the customer receives the PNR or booking confirmation voucher and takes that dream vacation.

For such loans, SanKash has variable interest rates which is dependent on their partners, product and risk profile of customers. For example, few of their partners offer products at zero per cent interest to all customers. However, a thorough assessment of the customer is done based on travel related information and some traditional data set. “Based on this, we are able to offer customers the most ideal price based on the risk levels they carry,” said Akash Dahiya, Founder, SanKash. Customers can take loan for three to 18 months term. And once loan is approved they are provided with a direct debit mandate from his or her account to be deducted on his choice of date and the financial institution does the needful every month.

SanKash is essentially a B2B2C model, since the approved loan amount is disbursed to the travel partner for the customer’s use on the trip. It is different because with respect to competition there are no travel loan option that currently originates at point of purchase. It processes the data and decision management through its proprietary decision engine.

Unlike traditional players, the platform processes customers and creates accurate borrower profiles through non-conventional data points generated on the basis of travel data. It then provides them with superior financing options at the time of purchase with offers curated from across its banking or NBFC  partner network.

SanKash acts like a platform where on the front end, travel partners, tour operators (big or small) can plug in, while on the back end any financial services partner can plug in to access this industry. The travel partner in this case will not have to run around and scout for 10 banks or NBFCs to service their customers’ borrowing needs in order to increase its sales and revenue.

As a platform, it connects and processes data and technological needs of both partners, meaning that apart from providing an alternative to standard payments options, SanKash improves important travel marketing metrics including conversion, booking value, channel loyalty, cross-selling, and ancillary revenue for its travel partners to process travel packages without any hassle.

“Sankash is the only travel loan option that originates at POS for a specific purpose and for that trip only, which thus can be offered to anyone and everyone (no credit card or pre-approval required). Thus, we service or offer payment option to customer of our travel partners rather than other way round,” said Dahiya.

SanKash is an example where technology has removed inefficiencies in the system by bridging the gap between those who want to travel and those who are looking to fund them. And that is good news for the wanderlust in you.

anagh.pal@outlookindia.com