Nine years of learning one state properly.
We began as Vintage Holidays with one car and a rented desk. We are now a licensed tour operator, a cab company and a booking platform — all still run out of Kochi, by the same people.
It is printed on every tourism brochure in India, which has worn the meaning off it. We take the literal version: a guest in your house is not a transaction. You do not upsell them, you do not put them in a room you would not sleep in, and you do not disappear once they have paid.
Everything below is just the operational consequence of taking that sentence seriously.
One company that kept outgrowing its own name.
Nothing here was a pivot. Each step was the same business admitting it needed to own one more part of the trip to keep the promise it had already made.
Tours, cabs and the booking platform sit in the same room on Marine Drive. If your driver is late, the person who answers the phone can see the car.
Vintage Holidays opens in Kochi
Two of us, a second-hand Innova and a desk borrowed from a friend's travel agency on Chittoor Road. We sold three-night Munnar trips to families from Bengaluru and drove every one of them ourselves.
Registered as a tour operator, and wrote the four rules
The licence came through the same month we badly let down a family in Thekkady — a resold hotel booking that did not exist when they arrived. We drove three hours at midnight to move them. Then we wrote down the four rules and stopped reselling inventory we had not seen.
The name stopped describing the business
“Vintage” suggested heritage tours; by then two-thirds of our travellers were couples in their thirties wanting backwaters and hills. Same company, same licence, same phone number — a name that finally said what we do.
We stopped hiring cars and bought them
Every complaint we could not fix was a transport complaint — a driver who did not turn up, a car that smelled of cigarettes, a hire company that blamed us. So we formed Holiday Cabs Kochi and put the drivers on our own payroll.
The whole catalogue, bookable, with the real price on it
Thirty-two walked itineraries, forty-eight inspected stays and eleven destinations, online with honest pricing and no coupon games. The office still answers the phone; the website just means you can see everything before you call.
Four rules we don't break
No itinerary is published until someone from this office has done the whole route, in that season, at that pace.
A named designer replies within four working hours. Not a ticket number, not a call centre — the person who will build your trip.
Discounts are already inside the number you see. Inclusions and exclusions are listed line by line before you pay anything.
Car, hotel, guide — if any of it goes wrong it is our name on it. We fix it first and sort out whose fault it was afterwards.
Eleven of us. Nine have driven the routes themselves.
Four trip designers, three on operations, two drivers on payroll, and the two of us who started it. Nobody here is a reseller — when you ask whether the third-floor room at a Munnar bungalow is worth the extra ₹1,200, someone in this office has slept in it.
Boring, but worth checking before you pay anyone.
Every number below is verifiable with the issuing body. If an operator cannot give you theirs, that is your answer.
Come and see
Nine years of notes on one state. Ask us anything about it.
Walk into the Marine Drive office, or send the dates and let a designer come back to you within four working hours.