TravelScapes

Overview

TravelScapes is an English-language business-to-business monthly travel trade magazine published from New Delhi by Versatile Media. Established in January 2013, it is a pan-India publication for the people who sell and organise travel — travel agents, tour operators, hotels, airlines, tourism boards and their associations — carrying the latest news and views from the travel trade industry, together with destination features, guest columns, hotel features, reports and analysis, and event updates.

The magazine describes its brief in deliberately comprehensive terms: cover stories on the pressing issues of the travel trade, the happenings of the month gone by, profile interviews with the leading figures of the industry, sensitive issues that need raising, showcases of domestic and outbound destinations, India tourism statistics and the latest movements of people within the travel trade fraternity. Its publisher reports a circulation of 36,000 copies across India, and a sister edition for the Middle East launched in 2015.

Publisher and Offices

TravelScapes is published by Versatile Media, which presents the magazine as its monthly publication. The magazine's registered office, given on its own contact page, is at Satya Mansion, a commercial complex in Ranjeet Nagar, New Delhi. Beyond the capital, the publication has offices in Mumbai and Dubai, matching its Indian and Middle East distribution.

The people named in the magazine's masthead give a picture of a compact trade publishing house. In its September 2022 issue, Varun Malhotra is named as publisher and chief executive of Versatile Media, Pranav Khullar as director, and Aanchal Sachdeva as assistant editor, with advertising sales leadership based in Mumbai for that market. Trade magazines of this kind run on close personal knowledge of their industry, and TravelScapes' structure — editorial in Delhi, sales strength in Mumbai, a presence in Dubai — reflects the geography of India's outbound and inbound travel business.

History Since 2013

TravelScapes was established in January 2013, at a moment when India's travel trade was expanding rapidly on the strength of outbound tourism, domestic aviation and a growing meetings and events business. A monthly B2B title devoted only to the trade — not to consumers planning holidays — served agents and operators who needed destination knowledge, supplier news and industry intelligence in one place.

Two years after launch, in 2015, Versatile Media expanded the brand abroad with TravelScapes Middle East, a monthly edition for the Gulf region, which the publisher reports reached a circulation of 28,000 copies across the significant GCC countries. The publisher has also produced supplements and pullouts to showcase at major travel trade events, and later launched MICEInsiders, a further title aimed at the meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions sector, extending the group's coverage of business travel and events. The parent magazine, meanwhile, has continued as a monthly print title with its full issues also readable online.

What the Magazine Covers

The regular sections named by the publisher — destination features, guest columns, hotel features, reports and analysis, and event updates — frame a consistent editorial mix. Cover stories take up the serious, current questions of the trade; destination features showcase places in India and abroad that agents can sell; hotel features introduce properties and hospitality developments; and reports and analysis, including India tourism statistics, give readers the numbers behind the market.

Profile interviews with industry leaders are a signature element, as are appointment and movement reports recording who has changed jobs within the travel trade fraternity — small items that trade readers value highly, because their business runs on relationships. The publisher also notes that the magazine's vibrant cover page has won sincere compliments every month from veterans of the industry, a point of pride for a title whose covers must stand out on the counters and desks of travel agencies across the country.

Audience: The Whole Travel Trade

TravelScapes says it covers all bases of the sector: travel agents, tour operators, travel trade associations, the Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the hospitality and aviation industries, national and international tourism boards, state tourism bodies, online travel portals and cruise brands. Media directories classify it accordingly, with a trade and B2B scope, English language and India as its country of publication.

That breadth is the magazine's commercial logic. A tourism board promoting a destination, an airline launching a route, a hotel group opening a property or a cruise brand entering the Indian market all need to reach the agents and operators who actually sell travel in India. A pan-India trade monthly with a reported 36,000-copy circulation puts those messages in front of that selling network, in print and, through its website, online — a network no consumer magazine can replicate.

Circulation and the Middle East Edition

The publisher reports a circulation of 36,000 copies pan-India for TravelScapes, and 28,000 copies across the major GCC countries for TravelScapes Middle East, launched in 2015. These are the publisher's own reported figures, as carried in its about material and repeated in its recruitment and trade listings, rather than independently audited numbers, and readers should treat them on that basis.

Even as reported figures, they describe an unusually international Indian trade title. Offices in Delhi, Mumbai and Dubai support the two editions, and the Gulf edition speaks to the scale of travel between India and the Gulf countries — for work, family visits, holidays and business — and to the Gulf's role as a hub for Indian outbound tourism. An Indian travel agent reading the magazine is thus kept in touch with the Middle East market its customers use most, as well as with destinations worldwide.

Awards and Industry Recognition

The publication was awarded Best Travel Trade Publication at the IATO Convention 2015, Best Live IATO Dailies at the IATO Convention 2016, and Best Travel Trade Publication again at the IATO Convention 2017, according to the publisher. IATO, the Indian Association of Tour Operators, is one of the trade's principal national associations, and its convention is a fixture of the industry calendar; its awards for travel media are decided within the trade itself.

Three awards in three consecutive years, including two for the publication as a whole and one for the live daily publications produced at the convention, amount to sustained peer recognition rather than a single success. For a magazine founded only in 2013, winning its first such award within two years and repeating it established TravelScapes quickly among the established titles of Indian travel journalism.

Events, Supplements and Trade Presence

TravelScapes' work extends beyond its monthly issues. Since its first year it has produced supplements, pullouts and other publication material to showcase at national and international travel trade events, and its award for live convention dailies shows it producing publications on site, during the event itself, for delegates the next morning. For trade readers, that event presence makes the magazine a participant in the industry's calendar, not merely a reporter of it.

The group has widened that presence with MICEInsiders, its title for the meetings and corporate events sector, which the publisher says has won support within the corporate sector. Together the titles let Versatile Media cover leisure trade, business travel and events — three markets whose suppliers and buyers overlap heavily — from one New Delhi publishing base.

Digital Presence

The magazine's website, travelscapesonline.com, presents TravelScapes as an online travel news portal as well as the home of the print title, carrying travel trade news across aviation, hospitality, events and market analysis, and offering the soft copy of the magazine for readers to view online. Media databases list the title as an online and digital outlet as well as a print magazine.

For a B2B title, the digital arm serves readers between monthly issues: appointments, route and hotel news, event announcements and destination updates can be published as they happen, while the monthly print edition retains the cover stories, interviews, features and analysis that reward a longer read. Advertisers and tourism boards gain both rhythms — immediate online visibility and the permanence of a printed magazine on an agent's desk.

Role in the Indian Travel Trade and How to Read It

India's travel industry is vast, fragmented and relationship-driven, spread across thousands of agencies in hundreds of cities. A pan-India trade magazine gives that industry a common reading experience: the same cover story, statistics, interviews and destination showcases reach an agent in Delhi, an operator in Mumbai and a tourism board office overseas in the same month. TravelScapes has performed that function since January 2013, and its IATO awards and reported circulations suggest the trade has taken it to itself.

Readers can take the magazine in its monthly print edition, read issues online through travelscapesonline.com, and follow its news coverage on the same site. Its registered office is in Ranjeet Nagar, New Delhi, with offices also in Mumbai and Dubai, and its publisher is Versatile Media. For travel agents, tour operators, hoteliers, airlines, tourism boards and everyone selling India — or selling the world to India — TravelScapes remains one of the Indian travel trade's own monthly voices.