“Nearly 3000 people traveling to Australia with us [for T20 World Cup]”: DreamSetGo Founder Monish Shah
DreamSetGo founder and chief business officer Monish Shah is bullish about the future of enhanced live sporting experiences for Indian fans.
Set up in 2019 as a distinct brand under the Dream Sports family that also notably includes fantasy sports app Dream11 and sports live streaming platform FanCode, DreamSetGo (DSG) aims to become a trusted name in the niche sports tourism industry.
“The vision is to make sports better,” Shah tells Sportskeeda.com's Vedant Shinde in an exclusive conversation. “We want to bring global sports to Indian fans, make it accessible, and then we want to take it [a] notch higher by giving them incredible sports experiences which become a memory…it becomes something you remember for a lifetime.”
Benefiting from its association with well-known sister entities, DreamSetGo has already secured exclusive partnerships with leading football clubs in the EPL (Manchester United, Manchester City, and Chelsea). It is also the official agent for the upcoming T20 World Cup in Australia, and is offering packages to all F1 races, tennis (Wimbledon and Australian Open), and next year’s Rugby World Cup in France.
DreamSetGo's team is all set for the T20 World Cup in Australia
DSG’s vision is to not only provide reliable matchday ticketing and hospitality but also give clients unprecedented pitchside access, meet-and-greets with legends, memorabilia, and sightseeing opportunities.
“While sports experience is the core, we package it really well with travel. Nearly 3000 people are traveling to Australia with us [for T20 World Cup],” Shah says.
Highlighting the planned experiences around the upcoming T20 World Cup in Australia, Shah said:
“Right from premium accommodation to…experiences like Yarra Valley, a private wine tasting lunch, to have a ballroom booked at Sydney Opera house…[the] itinerary [is] packed with incredible experiences. [There’s] also [a] private yacht dinner planned with Brett Lee, [and a] DSG Diwali party where we have got Venkatesh Prasad, Harbhajan Singh, Aamir Sohail, Mike Hussey [and] Gautam Bhimani. After [a] long [time] you will see Aamir Sohail and Venkatesh Prasad getting together. What better than these two names for a precursor to the India-Pakistan game!”
Besides leveraging such traditional rivalries in cricket, and marquee events in football, F1, tennis, and rugby, Shah reveals that DreamSetGo is keenly evaluating “large sporting tournaments across these sports and successfully delivers them to fans in India.”
Capitalizing on revenge travel
While the two-year-long pandemic proved fatal to the tourism industry, DSG was able to weather the storm thanks to backing from its parent organization. Shah used the downtime to build the right team and develop long-term partnerships.
Elaborating on how DreamSetGo can navigate any future adverse scenarios that could result in travel restrictions, Shah said:
“We actually used [the] pandemic [as an] opportunity to set a strong base for DreamSetGo in terms of ‘rocketing’ [as and] when revenge travel comes back, which it has. In the future, we continue to explore options and solutions to enhance our product, [and] at the same time to ensure that the add-ons can have us more equipped in times that can get challenging.”
Some of these "add-on" activities include virtual interactions with sporting celebrities, and digital experiences designed to keep clients engaged in a manner that can come as close as possible to a live match experience.
Tapping India’s “billion sports fans”
With a 50+ strong team spread across sales, travel, experiences, partnerships, and marketing, DreamSetGo has identified three target audience categories – corporates, high net worth individuals (HNIs), and individual travelers (i.e., F.I.T. or Free Independent Tourist).
Detailing DreamSetGo’s strategy to attract well-heeled corporate travelers, in particular, he adds:
“We’ve also got an extremely strong MICE team that is focused on the incentive travel that corporates look at to reward their dealers, distributors, agents etc. We are targeting their top 10-15 percentile of premium travel focused on their CXO clubs, premium dealer experiences, or agent experiences…It’s actually being received very well by corporate clients to be able to give them a very different experience from their partners. And hence that’s moving away from typical, traditional MICE and giving them experiential travel.”
All in all, Shah feels there’s a total addressable market (TAM) of “a billion sports fans in India” and DreamSetGo’s goal remains to offer “something for everyone”.