Founding an Inventive Travel Enterprise

Let’s start with what one might call a ‘fun fact.’ Or for the more ponderous folks, an origin story. Why is Mysore called Mysore? In the Netflix show on royal Indian kitchens, Raja, Rasoi aur Anya Kahaniyan, Vinay Parameswarappa is seated by an ebullient Kaveri River as he expounds on the city’s name.

According to legend, Vinay explains, the demon Mahishasura was once in charge of the terrain. Seeking immortality from Shiva, the asura was assured by the God that he wouldn’t be killed by any man. The tyrant continued to tyrannize his subjects, who prayed, in turn, to be freed of their brutal ruler. Exploiting the chink in the demon’s ask, Shiva sent a woman or goddess to kill him. The 10-day Dussehra festival celebrates Chamundeshwari’s overcoming of Mahishasura.

Long story short, Mysore is an anglicized version of Mahishasura, the city once ruled by the brazen asura.

Our nation abounds with such stories. Some drawn like this one from legends or history books, others spun into being by conversing with street vendors or neighbourhood aunties or rickshaw drivers. It’s the kind of stuff that can reinvigorate quotidian walks if only someone would plumb our local riches. That’s exactly the mission that galvanizes Vinay, Founder and CEO of Gully Tours, who’s determined to infuse city tours with a seductive pizzazz usually associated with foreign locales.

Inheriting a Travel Bug

Like the Russian Matryoshka dolls, storytellers are constituted by stories. Well before founding Gully Tours, Parameswarappa was one of many students scampering about a Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) campus in Bangalore. As the child of a KV school teacher, Vinay’s schooling was so inexpensive, he earned back everything that his parents had invested in his schooling during his first month at a formal job.

Attending a Government-sponsored institution bore other advantages. “You had people from all backgrounds,” he observes. “Somebody was an army officer’s kid and somebody was a bus driver’s kid. We didn’t know. It didn’t matter.” The KV school was a true microcosm of a variegated nation, ensuring the kind of jostling that would be hard to replicate at contemporary international or elite schools.

His father also had a zealous interest in traveling: “Every summer we would go somewhere or the other.” Vinay recalls the frisson at the Wagah border, or the rarity of a dosa in Simla, where it was displayed in a showcase. The passion for travel was transmitted from father to son, so much so, that many years later, when Vinay moved to Singapore for work, he couldn’t wait to explore South East Asia.

By then, he was a qualified engineer, having garnered work experience at Dell. He was only 24 years old, and as he puts it, “young and stupid.” His forays around the sun-licked, sea-sprayed region revived memories of his college quizzing days. For instance, he had already watched The Bridge Over River Kwai, so it was particularly striking to encounter the bridge that featured in the film.

Sensing an Opportunity

He also noticed something else. That the tours in those spaces were extremely well-organized, with riveting guides and imaginative itineraries. It baffled him that Singapore, which was only a tiny city-country drew more tourists than all of India. This despite the latter possessing a very rich history and ancient civilization. He started dwelling on this gap.

He realized that India – despite its deserts, beaches, snow-capped mountains, windy rivers, and stunning backwaters, its medley of foods and festivals – lacked the snazzy “packaging” that other countries had mastered.

For instance, on a walking tour through old Chinatown in Singapore, he was completely gripped by the experience. This was not the scripted recital of one monument’s history after another. Small neighbourhood anecdotes were woven into the street walk, including the guide’s personal association with the market.

Like how her grandmother had immigrated into the area, and how heroin was once sold there. Or how the place had been reshaped since her childhood. Vinay recalls: “I was like wow, you could touch and feel the place. When I finished the tour, I wanted to go back and do something like this.”

Setting Up Royal Mysore Walks

Such a career would meld Vinay’s interests: his love of people, his passion for trivia, and his zeal for travel. Besides, he wasn’t relishing his corporate career. Grateful for the savings he had accumulated, he opted to invest that money into his new venture. When kickstarting Royal Mysore Walks in April 2009, he recalls being young enough – in his mid-20s – to be undaunted by his leap.  

At first, he was rather naïve about the prospects for such a business. As a champion quizzer since college, he was adept at gathering alluring nuggets about anything. Soon he had forged a route, stitched with stories and interesting facts. He expected, as a logical next step, to be surrounded by rapt walkers. The response, in the beginning, was rather tepid. Some folks asked if this was just a “morning walk.” Others wondered why they should pay to walk around a familiar place.

To solicit feedback, he offered free tours to tourists. Some visitors were intrigued that he used to work for Dell earlier, and agreed to try it out. But besides garnering helpful feedback – from friends, locals, and tourists – the first six months were dispiriting. A few odd guests could hardly generate sustainable revenues.

Tapping New Segments

Then he heard about the Administrative Training Institute (ATI) in Mysore, where government officers from across the country were trained. Knocking on their doors, he met with an officer who seemed captivated by his offering. Eventually, she sent a group out on one of his walks and received encouraging feedback. Over the next four years, more than 5000 officers sauntered out on these learning walks.

Some officers had attended college in Mysore but perhaps hadn’t seen their city in this light. Others had travelled to various parts of the world and appreciated Vinay’s attempts to bring the locale to life. Many wished they had been taught in this manner, to make the world and their own city a sort of living school, instead of being confined to drab classrooms with “facts” divorced from their environs.

At the end of three or four years, Parameswarappa’s team had expanded to about five or six people. The customer base had also widened to include international travelers, corporate delegates, and school kids. Around then, inspired by a talk by Jose Dominic, a travel visionary who propagated sustainable tourism, Vinay sensed that his walks could drive respect for local artisans and other small enterprises.

Besides, he was intent on heightening the experience. To infuse the walks with fun and learning, but not in a pedantic fashion. Many of these travelers were likely to come only once to such cities. The challenge for the team was this: how do you make their one-time experiences unforgettable?

Detouring Into Business School

Gradually, their enterprise started attracting media attention. Whenever interesting folks visited Mysore, they were sure to opt for walking tours. But rather than blindly scaling his venture as it was, Parameswarappa decided to take a two-year detour into Business School.

As an MBA student at the Said Business School at Oxford, he started viewing his enterprise from different angles. As the Chair of the Entrepreneurship Club at the School, he also met with other founders. Soon after, he joined a UK-based start-up as a Product Manager. But keen on reinvigorating his own start-up journey, he moved to Bangalore.

Founding Gully Tours

When he came back to his business this time, he arrived with what he describes as a “Silicon Valley mindset.” He had absorbed the ‘Think Big’ memes of the startup culture, to touch a billion lives or make a billion dollars. While founding Gully Tours, he planned to create a sort of Etsy for tours, but he ran up against bottlenecks: like the availability of quality talent in an untested segment. There were cultural inhibitions about turning into tour guides, which was typically pegged as a low-status job.

Establishing an Inhouse Academy

Gleaning lessons from initial mistakes, he decided to grow Gully Tours organically while overcoming hurdles along the way. To cultivate guides, the team set up an in-house Academy (called “The Gully Tours Academy”), where they also welcomed ideas for new tours.

They welcome a wide range of people into the Academy, from students to schoolteachers to corporate executives, and train them into becoming ambassadors for their city. Gully Tours ensures that entrants grasp basic skills: like engaging audiences, telling great stories, displaying enthusiasm, and listening. Guides are also taught to improvise, as streets and audiences can throw up unexpected situations.

So far, many students have passed through their portals and moved on to fulfilling careers or educational pursuits abroad. Skills acquired at Gully Tours have been transferable to other careers. It usually takes up to two months to train a fresher. Some of the learning occurs on the street, based on feedback and customer ratings: “I saw people come in as absolute introverts and when they left in a couple of years, you could perceive a change in their personalities.”

Forging Creative Tours

Their tours tap into various aspects of the cities in which they operate. For instance, in Kochi, tours revolve around spices, the communities that have lived in the city, the types of trade conducted, or the fishermen.

In Bangalore, they offer a niche night tour for women – Pete by Night – that explores the humming Chickpet during the wee hours. Such tours reclaim nightly spaces that are out of bounds to women because of safety issues. They are planning to start a midnight trail on electric bikes. Their food tours start with visits to organic farms and end with the cooking of simple dishes. “We’re looking at where food comes from, how it’s grown, and then processed.”

So far, Gully Tours has abjured the use of technology – like mikes and headsets – by ensuring that group sizes are contained to about 12 to 15 people per tour. While this imbues the street walk with an old-fangled personal touch, Parameswarappa also observes that walkers then pay attention to other aspects of interaction, besides the voice. To “gestures, movements, expressions” that add vital layers to the experience.

Engaging with Diverse Guides

Vinay is emphatic that his guides are not experts on the place, or on particular aspects of it. Rather, they serve as interpreters – who do know fascinating tidbits, but not everything. If visitors ask a question that the guide cannot answer right away, they promise to revert later.

The guides themselves are from different backgrounds. One is a visual artist, another is a museologist, others are entrepreneurs, while some work in salaried jobs. They all bring their rich backgrounds and diverse perspectives to the job.

Vinay acknowledges that walking tours are a self-selecting mechanism because they attract people who are fascinated by slow, intense experiences. Such folks tend to be quite fascinating in turn. Sometimes groups split up into smaller groups, who then hang out at bars and cafes after the walk, fostering new relationships between strangers.

Advice to Other Founders

To new entrepreneurs keen to set out on similar journeys, he suggests that folks should start implementing ideas. Often money is not as much of a stumbling block as people might assume. “Run with it, start seeing progress; there’s nothing like reaping profits, and reinvesting that into the enterprise and watching it grow.” Patience is a necessary attribute. As Vinay observes, all good things take time. “If you’re able to deliver value, people will come back to you.”

References

https://www.gully.tours/