Jayanta Roy, director of Kaizen Leisure & Holidays, in Calcutta on Monday. A Telegraph picture

Calcutta, Feb. 18: Peerless Travel, an associate of Peerless General Finance & Investment Company, was today renamed Kaizen Leisure & Holidays after its management signed a franchisee deal with Thomas Cook (India) to help it turn around.

“We have signed an agreement with Thomas Cook (India) to distribute its tourism products to both our retail and institutional clients. We hope we’ll be able to report a 30 per cent annual growth rate in sales following this tie-up,” said Jayanta Roy, director of Kaizen Leisure & Holidays. He added that Thomas Cook had no equity participation in Kaizen Leisure.

“We’ll soon sign a similar agreement with another travel and tourism company based in West Asia. Our aim is to tap the outbound tourism segment which is growing at a fast clip,” Roy said.

The company is eyeing a sales revenue of Rs 10 crore in 2008-09. “So far, we do ticketing and hotel booking in the domestic market. Now we want to get into other areas of the travel and tourism sector, including foreign exchange and visa preparation. In fact, we’ll get into a new vertical every year,” Roy said.

Till now, 85 per cent of Peerless Travel’s total business came from institutional clients, primarily from pharmaceuticals, FMCG and insurance companies. “During the initial years, we’ll focus more on the outbound tourism sector,” Roy said.

For the inbound segment, Kaizen Leisure is also negotiating with a domestic travel and tourism company, Roy said. Thomas Cook manager (east) Suman Bhattacharya said, “The terms with Kaizen Leisure is of a franchisee. We have two such tie-ups in the eastern and northeastern region.”