A Gurugram counter since 2007.

SK Travels opened in 2007 in the Sector 14 market, two doors from where it still is, with one desk, one landline and a Maruti van for airport runs. Gurugram then had a fraction of the towers it has now. The customers were the families who had lived here before the highway, and a handful of the first Cyber City offices.

Both halves of the trade changed after that. The easy half (a domestic return, a hotel in Goa) moved onto everybody's phone, and it was welcome to it. Nobody needs a counter to buy a Delhi–Mumbai ticket. What did not move is the difficult half: a Schengen file with a gap in the bank statement, a group of ninety with three dietary requirements and one refusal, an attestation chain where the university takes a fortnight to answer, a traveller stuck at Doha at two in the morning.

So we stopped competing on price and started competing on judgement and legwork. We are in Delhi most mornings anyway (Chanakyapuri, Shivaji Stadium, the MEA at Patiala House) and there is no reason you should be. That is most of what you are paying for: the file built properly the first time, and somebody else standing in the queue.

Roughly two-thirds of our work now comes from people we have already travelled, or from someone they told. It is the only marketing figure we watch.