From Finance to Forest Stays
Aditi Balbir left a decade-long career in finance, including stints at firms like McKinsey, to found V Resorts, a company that partners with small, remote properties and helps them meet sustainable operational standards. Her model showed that even a modest 15-room resort could generate meaningful local jobs and income while limiting environmental impact — proof that ecotourism could be both a business and a community investment.
Verifying Sustainability, One Stay at a Time
Prerna Prasad built Ecoplore after leaving a career in news journalism, spending her first two years personally visiting and vetting eco-friendly hotels across India before listing a single one. Her platform requires strict criteria — meaningful tree cover, plastic-free operations, rainwater harvesting, and composting — and is run by an almost entirely female team, partly to make solo travel verification safer for women.
Turning Fisherfolk Into Tour Guides
Rashmi Sawant’s Culture Aangan took a different route entirely — instead of building resorts, she built experiential rural tourism around existing village livelihoods. In Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg district, women from local fishing communities now lead tourists on boat rides through mangrove creeks as an additional, dignified income stream alongside their traditional work.
The Common Thread
None of these ventures started with hospitality credentials. What they shared was a willingness to spend years on unglamorous groundwork — vetting properties, building trust with village communities, negotiating with vendors — before any of it looked like a “resort” in the traditional sense.
Bottom Line
The women reshaping India’s eco-tourism sector didn’t inherit a hospitality legacy — they built one, one relationship and one sustainability standard at a time.
