In Crisis – Travel Retail Voices: Gautom Menon, Wild Tiger Beverages : Moodie Davitt Report

There’s something that’s goin’ round, that’s shutting our borders down
It’s a bad time for our sick and our old
CNN’s nightly lullaby, tells of hundreds more that’ve died
I shut off the TV and think all alone, how long can this go on? – Jeff Orson, Pray

Welcome to In Crisis – Travel Retail Voices, our new podcast series in which we speak to travel retail executives around the world to see how they and their businesses are coping with the COVID-19 crisis.

Gautom Menon (right) and Paul George Vedanayagam during the epic 2019 Roartrip

Today’s episode features Gautom Menon, Founder and ‘Top Cat’ at Wild Tiger Beverages in India, one of travel retail’s most irrepressible characters.

Last year, Gautom and fellow Wild Tiger executive Paul George Vedanayagam famously completed an epic 65-day road trip from Kerala to Cannes, arriving just in time for the TFWA World Exhibition. The project – dubbed The Roar Trip – was an awareness and fund-raising campaign for tiger conservation, a cause close to Gautom’s heart. Via phone and social media, The Moodie Davit Report tracked Gautom and Paul’s every kilometre, producing a hugely popular daily media called The Moodie Davitt Roarport.

Martin Moodie caught up with Gautom at the weekend to see how he, his family and his business were doing amid a worsening health crisis that has seen India in national lockdown.