V Resorts: A New Way To Look At The Tourism Sector

• ByStartupStory     |    August 2, 2021

“Entrepreneurship isn’t a cakewalk. It requires a lot of grit. Passion can take you only to a certain level, but to succeed you’ve to be determined and consistent.” Aditi Balbir, Founder and CEO, V Resorts in a conversation with Startup Story.

Aditi, an opportunistic, dynamic, and confident entrepreneur completed her graduation from JMC, Delhi University; Post grad in Law from Symbiosis. She has pursued her MBA from ISB Hyderabad & Fuqua, Duke University. Before establishing V Resorts, Aditi had worked with companies naming Barings Private Equity, McKinsey and Company, etc. She has top-notch experience in management and business leadership. She has been selected as ‘Dell Foundation’s 200 most powerful women entrepreneurs in the world’ in 2016. In 2017, she was felicitated with the Young Women Business award by CNBC TV 18 and the prestigious WEF 17 Award of “Exceptional Women of Excellence 2017 in recognition of inspiring change through entrepreneurial mindset and initiatives. She has also been part of Fortune 100 Most Powerful Women Asia 2017, Shortlisted for Eisenhower Fellowship. Aditi was also one of the Juries on Outlook Traveler awards, and won the Smart CEO Startup 50 & Safari India Best Professional in Hospitality. Balbir has also been chosen by the Cherie Blair Foundation to mentor and guide women in business programs; an initiative to empower women to be entrepreneurs across the world. 

Idea Behind V Resorts

V Resorts was founded in 2014 with an idea to provide unique travel experiences. Aditi told Startup Story that V Resorts was the first chain that was standardizing services for boutique properties. “We were actually the first player in this market who understood boutique properties and we tailor-made all our services to fit the customer need for the same”. She continued by saying that, “people prefer staying at boutique properties over 5 Star hotels. And That was the main idea behind the establishment of V Resorts.”

V Resorts gives exposure of indigenous communities of India by offering resorts in the remote locations of the country. It offers an opportunity to travelers around the world to visit the immaculate and undiscovered places. As V in V Resorts stands for ‘View’ so the properties that it offers to its customers are scenic, beautiful, and offbeat. It enables its customers to experience even the minuscule details of the place they’re visiting by making them indulge with the local communities. From local food to comprehend their lifestyle, to discovering the regional arts and crafts, culture, traditions; one’d get the chance to experience the beauty of diversity.

This entire model of community involvement to run boutique properties, also called as ‘Circular Economy’ was pioneered by V Resorts. It has also been felicitated by UNWTO Awards in the Enterprises category, for its “Community Impact by V Resorts”.

This Indian leisure travel & hospitality Company has more than 150 properties across 21 states in India. Furthermore, V Resorts has its offering outside India as well, in Europe, London, and Rome. V Resorts operate with the Central government’s pro-tourism policy that focuses on the role of tourism in fostering employment and strengthening economic growth, and contributing to skill enhancement of local communities. V Resorts has adopted environmentally sustainable resources in their venture. They bestow special care to the conservation of water and the use of technologies like solar systems. 

While talking about V Resorts, Aditi also introduced us to her new venture ‘Veekends.com’, developed on 15th March, 2021. It’s a platform for eco-friendly properties. She illustrated the concept of Veekends.com, “Now-a-days people want to travel to sustainable places which are eco-friendly. If we look at the Booking.com report on sustainability that post pandemic, 88% of travelers are more interested in visiting sustainable places. But they’re not able to find these places, and even if they found travelers weren’t able to understand how the hotel is supporting eco-friendly parameters. Basically, there’s no standardization of breaking the complexities of these parameters. That’s why we created a platform known as Veekends.com that will display all eco-friendly properties around the world along with the rating.” She further added that most importantly, the algorithm rates properties based on 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and 100 of its sub-indicators. “It’s very clear for the customer, firstly the customer will see the rating, then the main SDGs the properties cater to, thirdly they will be able to see what are the activities they can do over there, fourthly the customer will even be able to audit as they will get a feedback form at the end of it for rating the parameter.”

Team Behind The Success Of V Resorts

When asked about the team of V Resorts, Aditi told Startup Story that V Resorts has hard-working and interesting employees. She also told us how they have trained their employees. “As the employees were local community based, they didn’t have main training. They all had to be trained in basic hospitality skills. In 2014, we started with the training institute there we used to provide extensive training; on the job, off the job. We also used to send our employees to other hotels to see how they run. We used to do a lot of development work for these local community employees. We even made sure that if the staff member is a male, then the woman at home who is unemployed also becomes financially independent so we try to find some economic activity for them as well. We were trying to engage the local community to the fullest.’ V Resorts has around 3000 blue collar employees and 100 white collar employees.

The Customer Experience

Replying to Customer feedback Aditi told Startup Story, “We started V Resorts with a limited-service model, but that didn’t work at all. We even got bad reviews on Tripadvisor. Then we figured out Indian customers like to be pampered and they don’t want self-service when they come to a property like us. So, we completely changed our model and in our new model we were actually giving all the services to the customer. Since then, we started getting amazing reviews on Tripadvisor, our average rating across 200 properties on Tripadvisor was 4.2. In V Resorts customers more like the location as they are offbeat and they appreciate the local community connection. These were no. 1 priority in all the customer reviews we got.”

Investment Status

V Resorts have raised a total of $10 million whereas Veekends.com is completely bootstrapped. “Some of the investors of V Resorts provided the seed money for us to begin.”

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