Aditi Balbir

Aditi Balbir

Founder and CEO, V Resorts

India

Aditi Balbir is the Founder & CEO of V Resorts – an organization that provides holiday experiences that showcase the Real India. V Resorts is all about introducing the harried Indian city dweller to new and unexplored gems that are strewn all around India. The company delivers these experiences by identifying, engaging and managing unique little resorts, hotels and B&Bs that lie on the less beaten path. To ensure a well rounded experience for each traveler, V Resorts takes complete responsibility of delivering an authentic/local on-ground customer experience every single time.

A management graduate from ISB Hyderabad & Fuqua, Duke University, Aditi Balbir began her career in finance before establishing V Resorts as her first venture outside of finance in 2014. She set up the platform by spearheading two successive rounds of $ 9 million funding raised from known VC investors such as Bedrock & Seedfund, RB Investments. Her contribution to V Resorts has been all encompassing, having built the business from ground up, the task being to carefully curate, develop and manage unique resort properties in India. Currently V Resorts offers a choice of over 80 + unique experiences in offbeat destinations across 16 states in India, each offering something local yet maintaining a global standard of service levels. Every V Resort is built on a sustainable platform by fully integrating the local villages through employment, the development of new skills, showcasing local handicrafts and local cuisines and sourcing the majority of the ingredients from the local markets and mandis thus providing each customer with a tourism experience that truly captures the flavor of the real India!

These sustainable tourism efforts of V Resorts that include establishing new destinations in India with local community engagement ensured that the venture was recognized and awarded by the UNTWO at ITB Berlin in 2015 ad with the prestigious “Best Upcoming resort chain” by Lonely Planet in 2016.

Aditi Balbir is actually currently the only woman heading a company in this space; others in it are running family owned hotels. More and more women taking on leadership positions is what Aditi Balbir firmly believes is to be the future of women in the country. Aditi’s human resources vision is that V Resorts exists as an incubator for women who love their jobs. Aditi encourages them to tap their potential, leading to accelerated growth. Many tough verticals are headed by women, such as pre-operations and content creation which requires extensive travel. Taking her lead, these women travel to unexplored locations, visit resorts and get work out of the local staff – an area hitherto preconceived as a male domain.

With the aim of removing the roadblocks for budding entrepreneurs, Balbir launched and coached the young women’s leadership program – YWLP when she was a part of the faculty at the Infinity Business School in 2009. She aimed to empower and equip women who are starting, (or have started) their own companies with business knowledge, networking, and the spirit of enterprise. A panelist at Shakti, a partnership between National Commission For Women and YourStory, Aditi shared her thoughts and experiences on how to turn ideas into sustainable businesses.

Recognitions:
A powerful voice in the advocacy of fostering entrepreneurship in women, Aditi has held sessions with the women’s SIG and was part of start up jury at TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), Your Story & Assocham. She has been selected as ‘Dell Foundation’s 200 most powerful women entrepreneurs in the world’ in 2016.

In 2017, she was felicitated with the Young Women Business award by CNBC TV 18 and the prestigious WEF 17 Award of “Exceptional Women of Excellence 2017 in recognition of inspiring change through entrepreneurial mindset and initiatives.

Aditi has also been chosen from among women entrepreneurs worldwide to mentor and guide women in business programs by the Cherie Blair Foundation, in an initiative to empower women to be entrepreneurs across the world in 2016. She has been part of Fortune 100 Most Powerful Women Asia 2017, Shortlisted for Eisenhower Fellowship, is a TiE Charter Member, part of Jury on Outlook Traveller awards & ASSOCHAM, and won the Smart CEO Startup 50 & Safari India Best Professional in Hospitality.

Aditi has written for Economic Times, YourStory and Times of India and is in the process of writing her first book, which uses the past and present socio-economic conditions of the country as a backdrop to dissect and give insight into the prevalent human psyche in India. She has been passionate about traveling since the young age of six, and has traveled across 6 continents and over 135 cities till date.