India is where Karma Group’s story began – a single beachfront property in Goa in 1993, founded by a former rock band manager with an instinct for human connection over corporate formula. An instinct that has seen Karma Group expand its reach across the globe over three decades of adventurous expansion. And that instinct for connection still runs through the organisation’s veins, and perhaps nowhere more visibly than in the work of its Off-Premises Contract Surveyors (OPCS): a field marketing team that has quietly generated over USD 18 million in revenue instead of busily automating themselves out of the conversation as some in the industry were wont to do.
The numbers deserve a moment. In 2026, Karma’s OPCS team conducted 24,692 tours – each one initiated not by an algorithm or a retargeted ad, but by a person standing in front of another person, reading the room, building trust from scratch. Across Goa, Kerala, Rajasthan and beyond, in heat that tests endurance and monsoon conditions that test everything else, these surveyors have kept alive a discipline that most Western markets have long since written off as unscalable. In India, they’ve proved otherwise.
What makes this more than a sales story is the nature of the work itself. An OPCS representative isn’t closing a transaction – they’re introducing a lifestyle, explaining a membership model, and asking a stranger to imagine their future holidays differently. That requires cultural fluency, emotional intelligence, and a resilience that doesn’t show up on any dashboard. Rejection is a daily constant. Engagement, when it comes, is earned rather than captured.
Karma’s investment in this team reflects something the broader industry could stand to examine. As hospitality brands pour resources into digital acquisition channels – optimising click-through rates and cost-per-lead metrics – the human capacity to create genuine curiosity and desire has atrophied in many organisations. Here, it has been deliberately maintained, trained, and scaled. The OPCS model works in India not merely because face-to-face communication is culturally resonant, but because the team executing it is exceptionally good at it.
The result is a marketing operation that is both quantifiably effective and genuinely differentiated. Thirty-two years after John Spence first arrived in Goa and decided that India was the most exciting market he’d ever encountered, the OPCS team is providing daily proof that he was right – and that the most enduring form of brand building still begins with one person turning to another and saying: let me tell you about this.
