Mano Chandra Dhas

Of his fifty years in travel, thirty-five were spent in the Persian Gulf. He began in 1975 with Singapore Airlines in Chennai, on reservations and ticketing, then crossed to the Gulf in 1977 to join Kanoo Travel in Bahrain, where for most of his two years he was in charge of a shift at the airport ticket office. Two years later he moved to Dubai with Thomas Cook, where he helped the office secure its IATA accreditation, took charge of travel operations, and built up a substantial body of Flexible Individual Travel itineraries and group tours. His leisure and tour expertise was already taking shape there, well before the corporate work that followed.

In 1982 he joined Alitalia as Senior Sales Representative, covering passenger sales across the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait for the next decade. From 1993, he spent fifteen years with Dnata, the travel arm of the Emirates Airlines group, where he helped create the Business Travel International network across fifteen countries in the Middle East and West Asia, and also ran a contact centre of a hundred and sixty-five people. For twenty of his thirty-five Gulf years, he designed services and led the business travel industry across the seven GCC countries. That BTI project remains the achievement he speaks of with most pride. As Country Manager for Carlson Wagonlit in the UAE from 2008 to 2012, he built the operation into one of the largest in the region. In 2013 he started Coromandel in Bogotá, and in many ways returned to the work close to his heart, with origins in Bahrain thirty-six years earlier.

What stays from all of that is not the scale of it, but the texture: half a century of knowing how flights actually connect, which hotels look after older travellers properly, how a driver and guide should behave on a long day, and what tends to go wrong when no one is paying attention. It is the kind of knowledge that only comes from a lifetime of doing the work.

Mano's preference is for the unhurried journey, built around the traveller rather than around what is easy to sell. Whether the trip is private, with a guide and a car of your own, or a small group of like-minded travellers, the principles are the same: days that are unhurried enough to actually take a place in, three or four nights in a city instead of one, and a pace that suits the people travelling rather than the operator's calendar. The aim is simple: to come home feeling you have been somewhere, not processed through it.