Sharaf Travel clarifies company's future

Dubai-based travel group says it’s business as usual despite laying off key employees

Sharaf Travel has stressed that none of its travel divisions will fall by the wayside despite the company laying off six key staff members recently.

The company’s general manager, V. Jayaram, said the recent redundancies, which included key personnel such as Oasis Adventures operations manager Lisa Shortland and Virgin Galactic Accredited Space Office head of space marketing and PR Sharon Garrett, would have no bearing on overall business.

“This was a re-engineering process,” said Jayaram. “We have a healthy company and by doing this (making redundancies) the business will be even better and even more profitable.

“What’s more, of the eight people we laid off, we found new positions within the company for two of them so we only really made six people redundant.”

Jayaram denied rumours that Sharaf’s inbound business, Oasis Adventures, was on the brink of going out of business and said that the company’s financial controller, Hari Kumar, who had “previous experience handling inbound business” at agency SNTTA, had replaced Shortland. He did concede, however, that losing Garrett, who had brought in US $580,000 worth of deposits for Virgin Galactic, was regrettable.

“Sharon was good — we gave her the option to stay here to work on other portfolios within the group, but she had other commitments,” explained Jayaram. “We would have preferred it if she had stayed.”

Garrett has been replaced by Sharaf’s travel manager, Premjit Bangara.

When asked if Virgin Galactic was upset by Garrett’s departure given her dedication to the role and the relationships she had forged with key clients, Jayaram said: “They were not excited and they were not sad — there was no reaction. We have a status quo.”

Garrett told ATN that she missed being involved in selling the Virgin Galactic flights — a product she wanted to test out herself one day, so much was her passion for the venture.

“It’s a shame that the relationships that I have built will no longer go any further,” she said.

“I really hope to be involved in the project some time in the future.”

Garrett also revealed that since her departure from Sharaf Travel, one client had already withdrawn their deposit for the Virgin Galactic space flight.

Jayaram played down the loss of the client and said this was bound to happen during the current economic circumstances.

“Because of the market conditions, clients are thinking twice about spending such a large amount of money, so this is no surprise,” he said. “It’s not like we can drop prices, so we’d expect this to happen.”

Jayaram said the current focus for Sharaf Travel, which is the GSA for several international airlines, was to “continue to look for new clients”.

“We have a good strong team and we will make sure we continue to deliver the best — Sharaf Travel will be even better than before [the redundancies],” he explained.

“However, we won’t be opening any new outlets for now — we are not shrinking, just retaining what we have.”