A WhatsApp on a Friday afternoon
The tournament was over, the Gulf was in turmoil, and Jos Buttler wanted to get home.
In the aftermath of this year’s ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, with conflict in the Middle East throwing the region’s aviation into chaos and flights out of South Asia suddenly scarce, England’s players faced the same question as everyone else caught in the disruption: when, and how, would they actually get out? Stories were circulating of the South African and West Indies squads stranded. Buttler, due back at the IPL within weeks and hoping to detour through Geneva to see his family, didn’t wait for the chartered solution to materialise. On the Friday afternoon, he sent a WhatsApp to a travel agent in London.
“This is the situation. I’d love to get home as soon as I can,” Buttler recalls telling him. “What options are there to get to Geneva?” The reply: leave it with me for an hour. “And this is obviously when all the stuff was kicking off around Dubai, so there weren’t many flights,” Buttler says. “But he came back to me in an hour and said, ‘I’ve got you a flight out of Mumbai direct to England at three in the morning, and then a connecting flight on to Geneva.’ Two bags, sorted.” There were people waiting to help him through the airports. Back-up seats had been blocked in case of a delay. “I have no idea how,” Buttler says, “because everyone was looking and saying there are no flights available — yet he managed to get me out.”
The agent was Rohit Saxena, and the company is Coraaj, a sports and VIP travel and logistics operation that most cricket fans have never heard of and much of the cricket industry now cannot function without. The obscurity is a function of the work rather than a failure of it. Travel is the part of professional sport nobody thinks about until it breaks — and Coraaj has built a fast-growing business out of the moment it breaks, and the thousands of ordinary moments before it does.
It is, on paper, an unlikely place to build a moat. Travel management is about as commoditized as B2B services get: the barriers to entry are low, the margins are thin, and, as Buttler puts it, “there are a lot of travel agencies out there — there are even a number in the sports market.” And yet, across conversations with people who run cricket’s teams, tournaments and broadcasts, the same three words keep coming back about this one provider. As Buttler says: “Wow, they’re fantastic.”
From the cockpit to cricket’s back office
Saxena did not set out to work in cricket, or even, initially, in travel. Born and raised in Delhi, he moved to London around twenty-five years ago and spent time training as a commercial pilot. He entered the UK travel industry in 2001, and stumbled into the premium end of the business almost by accident: on a flight from Delhi to London he struck up a conversation with the man in the next seat, who turned out to be a major Indian industrialist and became Saxena’s first VIP account.
A fourteen-year stint at Ariana Travel followed, where Saxena established the corporate and VIP travel department. It was during those years that he built the reputation Coraaj would later be founded on: a mountain mover, the person clients called when the answer everywhere else was no. When Ben Stokes needed to reach New Zealand urgently for his father’s funeral in 2020, at a point when no flights were available, Saxena and his team chartered a PC-12 to collect the England all-rounder from Durham and found him a seat on a full flight out.
Among the long-standing clients Saxena looked after at Ariana, over more than a decade, was Manoj Badale, the lead owner of the Rajasthan Royals — a relationship that would eventually open the door to cricket. A venture of Saxena’s own, conceived before the pandemic and shelved as the world locked down in March 2020, was revived in July 2021. Coraaj began trading on 1 February 2022 as a company of two: Saxena and Akhil Dua. COO Sachin Jaggi — a former award-winning corporate travel consultant who cut his teeth on emergency support for VIP travellers in exactly the kind of high-pressure situations Coraaj now specialises in — joined just a month later and has built it alongside Saxena ever since.
One condition shaped everything that followed: the company would make money from the start. “Travel is low margin,” Saxena says. “We wanted profit from day one — which did happen.” From there, he says simply, “we never looked back.”
The Royals became Coraaj’s first client and foothold in cricket, and the sport quickly became what Saxena calls his “top game.” The company’s own description of what it does has since been pared down to a single line — if it moves and matters in sport, Coraaj moves it. A second IPL franchise, Delhi Capitals, followed; a third has been discussed. So did the Caribbean Premier League — the tournament itself and two of its franchises — the Global Super League, the production logistics for a run of ICC events, and, most recently, Major League Cricket in the United States. The franchise roster now reaches well beyond India: a team in South Africa’s SA20, and two in The Hundred in Southern Brave and Sunrisers Leeds. It is also handling travel for four of the six teams in the new European T20 Premier League that just launched on August 26: Glenn Maxwell’s Belfast Wolves, Rahul Dravid’s Dublin Guardians, Faf Duplessis, Jonty Rhodes, and Heinrich Klaasen’s Rotterdam Dockers, and the Edinburgh Castle Rockers.
Running alongside the team and tournament work is a broadcast roster that has become a substantial business in its own right, with Live & Louder, Sunset+Vine and JioStar among the producers whose crews and commentators Coraaj moves. Coraaj is the youngest-ever member of the Uniglobe Chairman’s Circle, the network’s top tier of global travel management companies, and was recently awarded the “Best Sports Travel Specialists” recognition for 2026 by LuxLife.
If Saxena is the external face of Coraaj, he is quick to say it has never been a solo venture. Besides Jaggi’s critical role as COO and Dua as Director of Operations; the team also includes Sangeeta Menezes as Head of Sports Travel. It is a small company, Saxena concedes, “with big labels.” The labels have kept getting bigger.
The tournament level: leagues, broadcasts and the Caribbean problem
Coraaj’s clients fall into three tiers, and the first is the largest in scale: the leagues, tournaments and broadcasters whose entire product depends on hundreds of people arriving in the right place at the right time.
Pete Russell, the Co-Founder and Chief Executive of the Caribbean Premier League, uses Coraaj across both sides of that equation — the league itself and Live & Louder, the production company he built, which now handles West Indies cricket, the CPL and the Global Super League and is pitching for more work around the world. The broadcast side alone involves crews and on-air talent flying in from India and every other corner of the globe, and roles changing in and out through a tournament: “They have to be on top of a whole heap of logistics, which they are,” Russell says, “and cost-efficiently as well.”
What also sets them apart, in Russell’s telling, is the ability to solve for geography rather than be defeated by it. “Getting to the Caribbean, and getting to the Caribbean at a decent price, is always a challenge,” he says. “They’re always very creative with how they do that. They’ll get you where you need to get to in the best possible time and at the best possible price.” The rest is reliability. “You get the dreaded call — ‘I need to be in Barbados tomorrow but the flights are fully booked’ — but Coraaj will find a way of getting you on the flight.” Which produces the strongest verdict of all: “They are not a problem for me. I have plenty of headaches to worry about. They are not one of them. Which is a joy.”
The tournament work also runs through cricket’s governing centre. Coraaj has handled the production logistics — moving the crews and commentators, not the teams — for recent ICC events, including the men’s World Cup, an under-19 World Cup and a Women’s World Cup. That access pays off in ways clients never see. During preparations for the 2025 Women’s World Cup, an ICC charter from Colombo to Visakhapatnam was suddenly at risk of being turned away, its landing slot withdrawn at short notice. Two phone calls by Coraaj — one to a ground handler, one to a regulator — secured the last available stand. The delegation landed on schedule, unaware anything had happened.
For broadcasters travelling those events, the experience is felt one delayed flight at a time. Danny Morrison, the former New Zealand pace bowler turned globe-trotting commentator, encountered Coraaj around the logistics of a T20 World Cup and again when a trip to Dallas for VTEX’s Battle of the Bats, produced in partnership with Major League Cricket, went sideways. “As we know in the subcontinent, there’s that wonderful saying — everything’s subject to change,” he says. “You just have to have a decent travel agent.” Weather pushed his flight back more than a day; locked out of the main US carriers, he flew twenty-six hours later than planned, fed options throughout. Whether you’re moving with a franchise or a broadcast crew, he adds, “you’ve got to have guys who are all over it. That was the beauty (of Coraaj) — just such good communication.”
The team level: the calendar as a war room
The second tier is the franchises, where travel stops being a convenience and becomes an input into on-field performance. Nowhere is that clearer than at the Rajasthan Royals, Coraaj’s original cricket client.
Alok Chitre, the Royals’ Chief Operating Officer, came to the IPL from motorsport, having run commercial and marketing for Mahindra’s Formula E team out of the UK. He sees the parallel immediately. Where Formula E spread eight or nine countries across as many months, the IPL compresses twelve to fourteen cities into roughly forty-five days — and one recent season stacked games and travel back to back, with barely a day’s breathing room between them. “It’s all extremely intense. It has to be fast, sharp, precise and accurate,” Chitre says. “You don’t have any room for error.” His framing is what he calls the value chain of the moment: “From the moment the player leaves the hotel to the time they check into the next hotel in the next city, they need to have a seamless experience.” Delivering it is not the franchise’s core competence — it is what partners like Coraaj are for.
Chitre’s most revealing observation is about why a commoditized service becomes impossible to leave. “I’d liken it to industries which, on the outside, are commoditized, but on the inside people find it very hard to switch,” he says. “Banking is one such example.” The mechanics are trust, history and accumulated knowledge. “If I have to travel today, I don’t need to give them my passport, my visa details, my frequent-flyer numbers,” he says. “They’ve got the entire database of our ecosystem. It’s seamless.”
His predecessor goes further on where the real differentiation lies. Jake Lush McCrum, who ran the Rajasthan Royals for years before leaving to become Chief Executive of the India Basketball League, knew Saxena before Coraaj existed, and lauds his “communication skills, problem-solving skills, and the calmness in any situation.” But, he says, “it’s actually the crisis-management areas where they’re so differentiated. We had various situations over the years where Rohit and the Coraaj team were able to solve things that I don’t think many others could have — get players where they needed to be.”
That, Lush McCrum argues, is the engine of the whole business. “Many of the players and staff started using Coraaj personally after working with them through us,” he says. “That’s where they built their whole brand profile — word of mouth.” From the seat of a chief executive, the calculation is simple: “When you’re in a high-stress situation and you have someone calm you can trust who executes incredibly well, it’s really helpful.”
The player level: peace of mind as performance
The third tier is the one Coraaj never had to sell. Its contracts are with teams, leagues and broadcasters, but its most striking endorsements come from the players those contracts brought Coraaj into contact with and then became individual clients — and they are not marginal names.
The reason is that travel, for an elite athlete, is not a perk. It is a persistent, low-grade source of stress layered on top of the stress of performing. “For elite athletes, you want minimal distractions and as little stress on the outside as possible, because you get enough from playing,” Buttler says. “So knowing that the stuff outside can just be taken care of, very quickly — that’s the difference.” He has dealt with plenty of travel providers across many teams. What separates Coraaj, Buttler says, “is just the personability and the level of service. It’s above and beyond, someone you can really trust. They seem to be able to find travel options I can’t see on the internet and handle it all from start to finish.”
The clearest illustration is also the most domestic. When Buttler’s Gujarat Titans reached the IPL final this past season, his wife, Louise, floated the idea of attending. “She said, ‘It’d be so cool to be there. Who knows when you’re playing in another IPL final,'” Buttler recalls. “So it’s easy to just say, ‘Okay, let’s get in touch with Rohit and sort you a flight,’ as opposed to the stress of doing it ourselves or asking someone who isn’t as efficient.” Louise flew out for the match and may have been in India for less than twenty-four hours. “Which should be stressful,” Buttler says, “but he just took care of everything and made it feel easy. There’s no sort of, ‘Oh no, my wife’s coming out, will she make it in time, will the flight be delayed?’ He makes it seamless.” The biggest game of the season, his life’s partner in transit for twenty-four hours, and a dozen ways it could go wrong. That combination is what can sit in a player’s head the night before a final. For Buttler, it never did.
Sir Gareth Southgate, the legendary former England football player and manager and a well-known cricket enthusiast, first interacted with Coraaj when he attended a Rajasthan Royals match last year and has used the company for personal travel across several trips since. His assessment, from a career spent moving teams around the world, anchors on two things. “They found the right balance of checking in to see that everything was going well, but without being overly intrusive,” he says. And the people on the ground — the local guides and fixers who so often make or break a trip — “were really outstanding, able to give great insight into the cities we visited, and had really good contacts.”
Southgate also explains why this work is so easy to undervalue. Players travel to a high standard and arrive at every destination already tense with a game looming, so “if there are big delays or poor organisation or poor hotels, that has a real impact on morale, as much as anything.” The stakes are high, in other words, and the reward for meeting them is that nobody notices. “Unfortunately, for lots of people in travel and logistics, it’s only when things go wrong that they’re really noticed,” he says. Which leaves clients only one way to register approval, and Southgate offers it: “The best indication I can give is that we went back to them, and we’ve used them again.”
Matt Dawson, the World Cup–winning England rugby scrum-half turned broadcaster, was referred to Coraaj by a mutual friend and has become something close to an evangelist. “I find myself, every time someone says they’re booking a holiday, saying, ‘Well, have you spoken to Coraaj?'” he says. “‘Oh, I don’t need one of those.’ I’m like, ‘You absolutely do.'” His example is mundane by design: a note to get to Lisbon on a Friday for a stag do and back on the Saturday for a works function, done in minutes with options laid in front of him. “People say, ‘That’s lazy, you could do it online.’ And of course I could — but for the vast majority of the time, it’s a lot more complex than that.” What he pays for is the accumulation of small things. “When they book you a train or a flight ticket, you’re in the seat you like — forward-facing, by a table, aisle, leg room. You’re not asking for it, you’re not searching for it. It’s just done.” He is blunt about why that matters at his level of travel: “Everyone sees travelling as a bit of a luxury. But it’s actually pretty tiresome. You want it to be as comfortable as possible, so you can be in as good shape as possible.”
Why a commodity sticks
Coraaj’s moat is not one thing but the compounding of several, each individually easy to imitate and collectively very hard to.
The first is relationships. Coraaj’s differentiation, Lush McCrum says, is “their relationships in the industry — airline and broader travel — meaning that when you’re facing challenges, they’re going to speak to the people at the top, whether that means accelerating visas, holding planes, or finding routes when there are cancellations.” The second is proactivity. “They don’t wait for you to say, ‘We need this,'” he says. “They’ll say, ‘We suggest this — we’ve already held it.’” The third is communication, the connective tissue every client mentions unprompted — the sense, as Buttler puts it, that “they always seem to be on the end of the phone.”
Underneath sits the infrastructure that lets a small company behave like a large one: a dual-hub operation across the UK and India, running around the clock, so that a request at 11pm on a Saturday reaches someone who can act on it. The proprietary back-office system Saxena and Jaggi have developed handles booking, billing and reporting at an error rate below one percent, and a single mobile platform gives clients live visibility of every traveller rather than a scatter of confirmation emails. Enquiries are answered inside thirty minutes and quoted within the hour. More than ninety percent of business is repeat. Those are the numbers behind what clients describe in plainer terms: options fast, problems absorbed, nothing dropped.
It is also, tellingly, a business its own founder frames less like logistics and more like emergency medicine. Chaos is the context the company operates in rather than an interruption to it. “It’s like a doctor doing a very successful operation,” Saxena says of the crisis weeks. “It gives you this huge sense of satisfaction. It’s all adrenaline — we don’t sleep.” He has been through worse than a single conflict’s disruption — the pandemic, and, years earlier, the Icelandic ash cloud that grounded Europe and had his team driving stranded travellers from the UAE to Oman to fly them out. “If you don’t have chaos,” he says, “it’s no fun.” It is the temperament clients describe from the outside — the calm at the centre — narrated from within.
Running the table
The trajectory from here points in one direction. The pipeline, Saxena says, is built on adding more federations and franchises and simply taking a bigger share of cricket wherever it is played.
What makes the timing sharp is the very crisis that opened this story. A conflict that paralysed the Gulf — cricket’s busiest transit hub — put travel and logistics, for once, at the top of every administrator’s mind, and left a trail of people who now know exactly whose number to call when the planes stop.
Weeks like those are how a company like this gets known, but they are not what it sells. The work that fills the calendar is the eight-week IPL that runs to schedule, the tournament whose crews land on time, the flights nobody remembers taking — and the standard is that none of it registers at all. “The best productions in the world are built on marginal gains — the tiny decisions that accumulate into something exceptional,” Saxena says of the philosophy Coraaj sells. “Sachin, the team, and I apply that same philosophy to travel. That’s what we mean when we say travel should be invisible.”
It is an unusual ambition for a company trying to grow: to become indispensable to an entire sport while remaining something none of its clients ever has to think about. In cricket, Coraaj is already most of the way to both.
cricexec spoke with Rohit Saxena, Jos Buttler, Sir Gareth Southgate, Matt Dawson, Danny Morrison, Alok Chitre, Jake Lush McCrum and Pete Russell for this feature.
