It was past 1 AM when one of our members called. He had a group on tour somewhere up north, something had gone wrong, and panic was setting in. By the time he hung up, three other agents from our community were already on a call with him. None of them had a stake in his trip. None of them were going to earn anything from it. They just showed up, because that is what we do for each other in TMIndia.
That, honestly, is the truest answer to the question we get asked all the time. What is TMIndia, really? Travel Market India is not the events. Not the deals. Not even the numbers, though I will come to those. It is the phone that rings at 1 AM and gets answered.
When we started this, the idea was simple. No travel agent should ever feel alone in this business. The industry we came up in treated competition as the default setting. Every other agent was a rival, every conversation guarded, every relationship a little transactional. We wanted to try something different. For us, the “C” in business was never competition. It was collaboration.
What started as a small circle of like-minded people has grown, over the years, into a community of 1,300+ members from across India. Together, our members have done more than ₹6,000 crore worth of business with each other. Not through a marketplace. Not through a tech platform. Just through plain, hard-earned trust, built one conversation at a time. The number still surprises me when I say it out loud. What surprises me more is what sits behind it.
Here is something we don’t talk about often. More than half of the agents in our community renew their BNI memberships every year for one reason, to stay in this community. Not for the chapter. Not for the leads. Not for the structure. They renew because TMIndia lives inside that ecosystem, and they don’t want to risk losing their seat at this table. The first time we figured this out, it took us a moment to absorb. People were not paying for access to deals. They were paying to belong somewhere.
That, in many ways, is what we have ended up building. A sense of belonging in an industry that doesn’t make space for it often enough.
The stories keep coming. Agents who walked into their first TMIndia event a little unsure, wondering if the warmth was real, and walked out as co-hosts of trips they would never have planned alone. Solo entrepreneurs who found mentors. Women business owners who finally had a room where their voice carried weight. Small-town agents suddenly with a national network behind them. We have seen acquaintances become collaborators, collaborators become co-founders, and quite a few business partners turn into something close to family.
We did not engineer any of this. There was no playbook. We just refused, from day one, to let Travel Market India become another vendor-led, badge-collecting, card-swapping setup. The agenda has always been built by the members, for the members. The conversations have stayed real, about real problems, real margins, real challenges. And the culture, we have protected fiercely. Honesty, warmth, respect, collaboration. Those four are non-negotiable for us.
There is no big secret to it. We chose, early on, to put people before performance metrics. To celebrate each other’s wins louder than our own. To call out shortcuts and shady practices, even when it cost us. And to make sure the size of the community never killed the depth of the bonds inside it.
That has held true at 50 members. It holds true at 1,300. We intend to keep it true at 5,000. And we intend, very simply, to make TMIndia India’s largest community, one that helps each other when in need.
The travel business, when you strip it down, is a trust business. Between agents and clients, between agents and DMCs, and most of all, between agents themselves. When that trust is real, the business follows. The ₹6,000 crore is not the cause. It is the consequence.
A community is not really what you build on a stage. It is what shows up when no one is watching. The midnight message. The referral with no commission attached. The agent who travels to another city to help receive a delayed group at the airport. That is the TMIndia we know. That is the tribe we are proud to serve.
The next chapter of the Travel Market India story unfolds in Guwahati from 29th to 31st August, where the community comes together once again, to learn, to laugh, to break bread, and to remind ourselves why we built this in the first place. If you have ever wondered what it feels like to truly belong somewhere in this industry, come and find out.
Nidhi & Gaurav Hasija are the Founders of Travel Market India (TMIndia). They can be reached at www.travelmarketindia.com.
