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If you are looking for personalized help with your travel
arrangements in India, I’d like to recommend a small family-run tour company,
Real Tours India, headed up by Javed Ali from New Delhi.
Javed Ali came recommended by a friend, and the one significant concern my cousins,
Noelene and Lionel Beardsley from Australia, and I had before meeting him was that he
didn’t appear to head up a very professional outfit. His written English was very
limited, and that his e-mails, although comprehensive in dealing with our questions,
were full of grammatical and spelling errors. However, none of this hampered his
understanding of what was required of him. Despite initial misgivings, and impressed by
his keenness to satisfy our preferences, the three of us decided to go with Real Tours
India rather than with other more business-like, large scale tour operators. We
didn’t regret it for a moment.
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Javed took great care to custom tailor our
three week itinerary through Rajasthan and other areas in India in October 2007, consulting us
all the way as to our budgets and preferences for hotels (we’d asked for 3 star
accommodation) and advising us gently (no high pressure stuff) if he thought another hotel
would suit us better than one we’d suggested as a result of our own research on Lonely
Planet and Trip Advisor. Thanks to the very roomy air-conditioned vehicle with a really good
driver (a rarity in India) that Javed laid on, we travelled between cities in comfort and
style.
And that wasn’t all. In order to make sure that everything was up to our expectations in
terms of price and quality (rooms, guides etc.) Javed personally accompanied us around
Rajasthan—and kept in regular touch via his cell-phone while we were touring other areas
around the country on our own, to make sure our hotel rooms, transport arrangements etc. were
up to spec.
Javed Ali takes a fierce pride in catering to his clients’
individual requirements,
so this is part of his usual modus operandi. If he isn’t available as an escort, one or
another of his brothers will usually accompany solo travellers (including women) as well as
groups of 20+ to ensure that they are satisfied with their tour arrangements. Granted that in
India things don’t run in quite the same way as they do in the west, there were one or
two unpredictable twists and few amusing incidents—none of which came as unpleasant
surprises.
Javed’s quote was most reasonable and compared favourably with other larger, more
established tour companies operating out of Delhi. His company Real Tours India, does have
websites of a sort, https://www.realtoursindia.com and but they are in Spanish (he
has a number of clients from Spain, France, Germany and other parts of Europe) and his
assistant, Peter, a Cuban, was responsible for setting them up. I’ve added them in for
interest’s sake but they really aren’t worth clicking on unless you are fluent in
Spanish.
Because Javed’s business is based more on personal contact than via his web-site, I
don’t think that adding an English version will be a priority for him, particularly when
competing among 386,000 other entries that surface on a Google search for “Tour
Operators in India.”
That said, if you are looking for someone who will go the extra mile to make your holiday in
India (particularly North India – i.e. Rajasthan, Varanasi, Delhi etc.), a memorable
one, you might like to give Javed Ali a try. His e-mail is armaanali786@gmail.com
or javedali64@hotmail.com
He’ll be thrilled to hear from you.
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