I thought a week in Goa would prepare me for the rigours of India, but arriving at Bangalore airport was still a culture-shock. After a week of trying to book flights (less airport tax is payable if internal flights are booked once in India) and a decent hotel (they aren’t lying when they say that hotels are full!!!) we finally arrived on a low cost flight with DeccanAir - £55 return from Goa.

The government protect visitors by running a set price taxi service from most airports and the pre-pay system stops any problems with over-charging etc. We actually got 2 drivers for the price of 1 when the first stopped; announcing that this was as far as he was allowed to go and another took over, taking us to our hotel, the Kamat Minerva. Strange, but it’s all part of India’s charm along with mad tuc-tucs and zig-zagging traffic trying to make 5 lanes out of 3

As business hotels go, the Kamat is clean and extremely basic, but at £20 a night who can complain. Bangalore is a booming version of Silicon Valley, with hi-tech industry and the speciality hotel prices to match. Whilst in the rest of India high quality hotels can be had for great prices, Bangalore’s mid-price hotels will set you back upwards of £70 per night into the hundreds for Taj luxury (London prices, in fact). Booking direct with the hotels saves some money, but is an experience in itself! 

Once in Goa, we found that travel agents add around £20 a night for a mid price hotel, so we decided to book ourselves via websites. Thus followed four days of frustration when credit cards wouldn’t go through and phone calls ended in garbled requests for faxes of the front and back of our credit card! Identity fraud here we come!!! Eventually, we found the phone number of the Kamat Minerva itself and ended up paying Indian prices by giving our hotel address in Goa! Frustrating, but it saved us around £30 per night. It would have been much easier if I had contacted either of the companies that I was seeing, who would have booked for me, saving money and my grey hairs. They usually use St Mark’s hotel, as it is close to the shopping and bar area of MG and Brigadier Road and is a good mid-range business hotel.

I’m here to visit 2 embroidery companies that I found at TexWorld in Paris in September and have had great help from various quarters in the UK with my trip. South Yorkshire International Trade Centre in Sheffield (it was them who you saw being winched by helicopter from their flooded offices on the national news this Spring!) gave me some great info on the Karnataka (Bangalore) Chamber of Commerce (www.fkcci.org), the Clothing Manufacturers Association of India (www.cmai.info/), the Confederation of Indian Textile Industry (www.citiindia.com) and the Apparel Export Promotion Council (www.aepcindia.com). I e-mailed all of these before leaving the UK, but without success – probably due to address problems, but hope to set up meetings whilst here. They also directed me to HM Customs etc to find out about import licences and duty etc. Certain items produced in India incur lower UK duty, but a ‘GSP certificate’ must be produced by the manufacturer.

The factories have been extremely helpful, offering to pick us up from our hotel etc.

 
Read more about our findings in Day Two of my blog - flying its way over to FashionCapital soon.

 
Fiona x

Fiona Thomson Design

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