CEO - Jovago Pakistan

Blurb: The Company has grown leaps and bounds in the last two years. The work we are doing is actually helping Pakistan as a whole, and that is my greatest inspiration

Evolve: Please share rundown of your professional background with us?

Nadine Malik: I graduated from Bryn Mawr College, USA and started my career as a banker with Citibank Pakistan. After 4 years at Citi, I decided to pursue my MBA at INSEAD, France and then worked for 2 years as a Management Consultant for Bain and Company in Singapore and Dubai. After I got married, I moved back to Pakistan and started working with Engro Foods. I joined Rocket Internet in August 2014 to establish operations for Jovago.pk, Pakistan’s first online hotel booking platform. Currently, I am managing the operations of Jovago for three countries, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar; serving in the capacity of Managing Director, Jovago Asia.

Evolve: What is the secret of Jovago’s continuous and consistent growth in Pakistan?

Nadine Malik: The Company has grown leaps and bounds in the last two years.I was able to take Jovago to such a level because of the strong support I have from both, the local and international teams. The work we are doing is actually helping Pakistan as a whole, and that is my greatest inspiration. Being a fond traveler, I wish to see people travel here more because we have so much to offer! Jovago is a job that lets me pursue my interest in traveling by onboarding others to come and visit.

Evolve: What have been the greatest lessons you have learned about the hospitality business, since you have started this project?

Nadine Malik: According to the surveys, we have done, the first two things that people look at are price and convenience. They are by and large price sensitive when choosing hotels.

We try to have enough information available on our website as we want our customers to make informed choices. People have different benchmarks for what is a good service standard. To combat that, we take reviews from the customer and upload them on our website. This helps them to make educated guesses about the hotels.

A customer may have mentioned that a certain hotel does not have good breakfast, but another customer may be willing to forgo the breakfast if the hotel fits their price range. There is an automatic review score that is calculated.

Evolve: What significant changes have you noticed in the hospitality industry over the past twenty to thirty years, and where do you see the industry heading?

Nadine Malik: There are multiple indicators showing this industry will contribute more in the upcoming years. Growth in air travel and hotel occupancy are among the top indicators of travel and tourism industry growth. For example, in 2016 the hotel occupancy increased up to 80% as opposed to 35% in 2015. These can be attributed due to many reasons. Firstly, due to improved security conditions over the past couple of years, more and more people are now preferring to travel within the country. This in addition to the increased awareness about the yet unexplored beautiful places within the country, has tremendously increased the travel within the country.Secondly, the recent government initiatives like the signing of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor have poured in a lot of investments that can lead to very desirable results in the overall travel and tourism industry of Pakistan. For example, recently we witnessed many Chinese nationals using our services to arrange their accommodations within Pakistan. We have also observed that unlike the past, people are now visiting emerging tourist spots that weren’t very popular tourist destinations in the past. Previously, most popular tourist destinations included Muree, Naran, Kaghan and the adjoining areas. Recently, many new airports have begun operations or expanded and each saw double-digit growth in passengers. Whereas, these days, thanks to improvements in the roads and infrastructure facilities, people are visiting emerging tourist spots like Muzzafarabad and parts of Azad Kashmir and interior Sindh.

Evolve: How do you balance pursuing opportunities and maintaining focus? 

Nadine Malik: I think strict adherence to your values is the key here. At the time when your business demands you make some tough choices,  you ask yourself what are key values of your company. This gives a lot of clarity to make hard choices for your personal as well as your professional lives.

Evolve: How does a hotel start offering bookings through Jovago? What’s your operating procedure for populating the list of hotels?

Nadine Malik: We are working with hotels and guest houses of all price ranges. We have big name hotels such as Ramada, and other smaller ones which you probably have not heard about. Our team goes out and visits the hotels and guest houses who sign up with us, to verify if they exist and to make sure they are in a condition worth staying in. Obviously, the kind of hotel or guest house you chose to stay in depends on your budget, and the experience will also vary depending on where you stay. So, to answer your question, we work with all hotels and guest houses and do not discriminate based on their stars as we want to provide accommodation that suits a variety of budgets to all Pakistani’s who want to travel and explore the country!

Evolve: What kind of culture you have maintained at Jovago and how would you throw light in its significance?

Nadine Malik: Being a startup, we encourage a very open culture where we strongly pursue open door policy. Also, we encourage our employees to have a very customer-centric focus, where we strive every day to conquer the hearts and minds of our customers, which includes our hotel partners as well as travelers who visit our website. Every day, we learn a lot from customer service. We ensure that each department is aware of what is happening for the decision-making process to be faster. The online hospitality industry is an uncharted territory right now, therefore, we wanted to have access to the call center's knowledge and experience. I have personally listened to calls and taken bookings and so I encourage other departments to do the same.

Evolve: What is special about Jovago that separates it from your competitors?

Nadine Malik: We make the difference from our Classique Customer Service (which is about taking the order and handling complaints) by creating trust not just for our customers but also for our esteemed Hotel partners.  This is one of the primary reason why we don't call our customer service member an Agent. We call them our Travel Advisors. Our Travel Advisors (based on the country of the customer destination) have unique knowledge about the hospitality industry, inventory of all kind of hotel (business, leisure, luxury or low costs etc.), transportation which enables them to facilitate our customers’ entire travel experience, not just any specific part of it. In parallel, our Travel Advisors are providing innovating means of communication with hotels to support automation of the market. For example, we recently conducted a training workshop for our hotel partners on the use of Extranet web which helps them to be full in charge of managing all the bookings that they make via Jovago. Unlike the usual customer service officers who would just facilitate the customer when reached out, we actually go an extra mile to facilitate our customer from the time he makes a booking through Jovago until the time he/she gets checked in. Our physical presence in the local market gives us an edge over our competitors as our strong hold in the local market helps us to best advise our customer to make the wisest travel decisions. Whenever a customer calls us, our travel advisers’ offer their expert advice and recommendations on how to make their travel the most memorable one by making the wisest travel based decisions.

Evolve: Was there anyone in particular who inspired you early in your career? What did you find so inspiring about this role model to drive you towards success?

Nadine Malik: I would give great credit to my parents who have always encouraged, motivated and supported me to pursue my dreams, no matter how risky they may sound. I have received great mentorship from them, as they have always advised me and walked me through all the rough patches.

Evolve: How to maintain a diversified culture in your organization ensuring the respect of every belief/doctrine?

Nadine Malik: At Jovago, we encourage and pursue a very open culture where we appreciate the constant interaction among our employees. We strongly observe our policy of inclusiveness, whereby we encourage all the employees to take a more active role in helping and collaborating with their co-employees, assisting each other to be an active team player in the organization and to adjust in the culture of work as well.

Evolve: In your impressive list of career achievements, what do you personally see as your greatest achievement?

Nadine Malik: We have made many accomplishments last year and the accomplishment that I am most proud of is that we have managed to work very well with all our hotel partners’ especially smaller hotels and guest houses. We haven’t just convinced them about the potential of the e-commerce industry for their business, but we have also demonstrated the importance of online presence for increasing their business. We also offer periodic training on service standards that are extremely essential to acquire to thrive in this industry as well as share customer feedback frequently. We take pride in the fact that through Jovago.pk so many hotels and guest houses now have access to a range of customers that they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

Evolve: What goals do you have for the future of Jovago?

Nadine Malik: We plan on further expanding our hotels and guest house inventory to offer more and more choices to our customers. Our expansion plan is to sustain our upward growth and continue signing new deals with hotels and guest houses. We have also recently launched our customized tour packages at very economical rates so we look forward to continuing that in the near future.

Evolve: Any message for the readers of EVOLVE magazine?

Nadine Malik: Don’t be scared to travel to Pakistan! Pakistan is so beautiful and don’t let media define your perception – go out and explore!