mumbai cox kings has agreed to sell its adventure travel unit explore worldwide to uks hotelplan in order to focus on the leisure and educational tours business said a statement on tuesday cox kings which owns 100 stake in explore worldwide through its subsidiary holidaybreak agreed to sell the entire issued and outstanding shares of the ukbased company to hotelplan an eightdecadeold travel services organisation focusing on ski holidays the indian company will collect 258 million pounds about rs 258 crore from the deal explore worldwide which owns explore a soft adventure tours brand and regaldive a diving adventure specialist generated a gross profit of 23 million pounds on net revenues of 112 million pounds in fiscal 2015 the transaction will help bring down cox kings total debt of rs 2384 crore according to anil khandelwal chief financial officer cox kings the company intends to take off debt of rs 500 crore from its balance sheet this fiscal said khandelwal the financial resources will be used to improve the balance sheet in line with the companys targets the sale enables us to focus on three key verticalsleisure education and hybrid hotels meininger cox kings director peter kerkar said in the statement explaining the rationale behind the sale khandelwal said that there had been a fair amount of consolidation in the adventure travel space in the past few years with the largest players buying out mid and smallsized adventure travel players or the signing of exclusive partnerships with key distributors and vendors this left us with a choice between investing heavily to compete in this segment or to sell out and focus on the other areas of our business khandelwal said shares of cox kings closed at rs 250 up 369 on tuesday