Face-to-Face: Tran Thanh Nam
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This week, Travel Daily goes Face-to-Face with Tran Thanh Nam, CEO of Asia DMC, the company formerly known as HG Travel…
Q) After many years in the market, Asia DMC has announced plans for a major expansion. Why now?
The transition from HG Travel to ASIA DMC represents our growth from a local destination management company to a continental player offering innovative, new products throughout Asia. After a setback due to the global economic situation and losing a customer to our competition in 2015, we knew that 2016 would be a year where all of us would have to fight hard to remain amongst the best DMCs in Southeast Asia, and this challenge motivated the team.
We have decided to consider 2016 as a transition year, where we would look back at what was wrong, correct our mistakes and move on. The outcome was that all of us wanted to dream bigger, to go further and offer more in terms of destinations, quality, and focus on the markets we wanted to expand to.
Q) You are targeting several new Asian destinations; what is the roll-out schedule?
After fully setting up Thailand and Myanmar offices in 2016, our objective is to open Sri Lanka first and then Indonesia in early 2017, with the timeline for the other destinations following depending on the opportunities and on the people we meet. As long as we share the same vision, the opening of new destination can be very fast and easy as has been the case so far, so we are very hopeful for future openings.
Q) Do you have a final target in terms of office presence and manpower that you are aiming for?
We will offer more destinations to our existing partners who trust us, would like to expand along with us and have the same level of services they have been used to with HG Travel in Indochina. While this development seems very big and ambitious, we still want to keep what has defined us for the past 20 years: offering tourism at a human scale, with products created by somebody who we are able to empathize with and develop eye-catching itineraries for the end-customers, hence helping our B2B partners to stay above their competition.
In terms of manpower, in all our destinations, we are always looking for somebody who is both an expert of the destination and who understands the needs of different Tour Operators. We don’t have a limit in our development.
Our partners are eager to open new destinations with us and that is our motivation. We will stop if we don’t find ourselves able to provide the level of service expected of us, or when we deliver all of our partners’ needs in terms of destinations.
Q) What are the next steps Asia DMC is planning to take in 2017?
In 2017, we are of course planning to expand in terms of destinations, develop our teams and bring quality people in the group. We will also work a lot at supporting our current partners in their fight to remain ahead of the competition. To do so, we will develop our product research and development, as well as develop the terms of our partnerships with joint marketing activities, more education tools, more promotions, as well as new technology solutions to make the communication between our partners and us faster and more efficient.
Last but not least, we have proudly launched People of Asia, a foundation that aims at protecting environment, empowering local population, developing projects with several partners in Southeast Asia and we also are implementing a completely green office in our headquarters in Hanoi that will be further implemented in our other offices throughout the region.
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