The Road Not Taken or the ‘WrongRoute’?

When the political discourse of the country is increasingly getting divided between right and left, here is presenting you with something 'Wrong', which establishes itself to be delightfully right! This duo from Kolkata took Robert Frost very seriously and picked the 'WrongRoute' or as the poet says “The Road Not Taken”, and that indeed ‘has made all the difference’ for them.

The souls perpetually afflicted with wanderlust, left their jobs, turned their passion into profession and founded 'WrongRoute' in 2015. Two years down the line the gypsy girls are all smile for choosing heart over head.

Baishali Mukherjee recounts the jubilant conversation she had with the two of a kind.

It all started with love for roads

Since its inception in June 2015, our promise has been adding an extra dimension to travel by making vacations, trips and sojourns a little more than the usual, in an economic way. At 'WrongRoute' we bring in the promise of a personal touch to your itinerary, enhancing it into a better organised, more resourceful and a value for money experience. Here we are committed to provide more enjoyable experience through meaningful engagements with local people and a greater understanding of their culture. Apart from weekend gateways and luxurious holiday hotspots, we offer the hospitality of local home-stays and eco-tourism centres across North-Bengal, Sikkim, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Goa and our constant effort is to add some more to the list.

Being associated with a social enterprise our role involved extensive travel to different parts of India, to meet people from different communities. We gathered a lot of experience about different places and when it was time to start something on our own, it appeared that travel is something we know best, and we started this company.

Leap of faith

We were colleagues as well as friends and during our evening addas we toyed with the idea of doing something on our own and our mutual love for travel lead us here. Sananda left her job in the company and started freelancing and within a few months I left my job too and took the plunge. It was a risky decision for us, as I was newly married and had my family to support. But I found it necessary to take the risk. It took us 4 months from ideation to launching the project with our little savings from the last drawn salary. The initial years were tough as people found it difficult to accept the fact that two women can actually run a travel business. After a period of constant hiccups we finally succeeded in changing the perception to some extent. We got a lot of support from Mr. Debashis Bonnerjee, whose Facebook group created for travel enthusiasts promoted us liberally.

Today, we are a three member team with Paban Roy joining us in 2016, and operate through local community. One of our goals is to strengthen the community through our venture. We work with community organizations and local individuals.

Stay weird stay different

'WrongRoute' is a metonymy for different-route. From the very beginning we wanted to offer something different which is often considered wrong in the established societal context. Moving away from crowded travel destinations, many of which are fast losing charm due to over exploration, we started with organizing trips to unexplored destinations. Our avowal is to offer something new and exclusive. Fairs at villages which are home to traditional culture bearers are one of our flagship projects which create the opportunity for exchange between the community and visitors resulting in exposure, recognition and knowledge sharing. We also organize corporate trips and our next experiment is photo tours across the state of West Bengal sometime this year. In coming years we are going to expand it to other states.

A strong band of 600 satisfied customers, who travel with us to different places, is our strength and drive to do more and do better. We never spend much on publicity as we do not have that capital; word of mouth is our only way to reach out to people. We get new clients from our old ones. As a new player we have also got to earn recognition in this community of travelers. Professionalism is what gets scoured over every other index in any business. However, our tours being planned mostly to offbeat places, we cannot offer all the luxuries, but do ensure a quality, safe and hygienic experience and so far it has paid off.

What are your views on emerging non-commercial travel industry in the country?