In 2011 one of our founders travelled for Hajj with a large operator. On the day of the Jamarat his elderly father was separated from the group and spent six hours trying to find a tent nobody could describe to him. There were four hundred pilgrims in that party and two coordinators.
Cre8tive was built around the opposite principle. We cap our groups deliberately — forty pilgrims for Umrah, twenty-five for a VIP Hajj — because a coordinator can only genuinely look after so many people at once. It costs us volume. It is the reason our clients come back.
Since then we have added honeymoons, because the couples getting married were the children of the pilgrims we were already serving, and flight ticketing, because families kept asking us to find fares for relatives abroad. All three run out of the same office, with the same consultants.
I travelled with my parents, both over seventy, and my biggest worry was the walking. The hotel was genuinely a four-minute walk from Bab Al Salam and the group coordinator carried my father's wheelchair up the ramp himself. Everything they promised on the phone was exactly what we got.
They arranged a candlelit dinner on a sandbank in the middle of the ocean without telling us — we thought we were going on a boat ride. Seven months later we are still talking about it. Worth every rupee.
The pre-Hajj training was the difference. By the time we reached Mina I knew exactly what was happening on each day and did not have to follow the crowd hoping for the best. The doctor with our group treated three people in our tent alone.