Online platforms for budget hotels in India have been in the news. Oyo Rooms is the ‘oldest startup’ in the space which was started as Oravel in 2011 by the then 18-year-old Ritesh Agarwal. After graduating from the Peter Thiel Fellowhip program, Oravel pivoted to Oyo Rooms – a chain of branded budget hotels across several cities in India. Most recently, Oyo Rooms raised a massive $25 million round from Sequoia, Lightspeed and others. From starting Oravel to changing it to to OYO and getting Softbank on board, Ritesh Agarwaljust had one dream: making budget travel and stay easy for the Indian traveller. “There was a time when we booked a hotel room and didn’t expect much. Today the world is different, and I would like to believe we have contributed to it in some way,” says Ritesh. He and Abhinav Sinha, COO, OYO Rooms, gamely took part in a candid conversation with YourStory on customer complaints and challenges of scale. From 72 to 4,200 in a year It has been a fast growth for OYO, which began operations in 2014 from one city – Guragaon. Today it claims to partner 4,200 hotels in over 170 cities, booking close to a million room nights a month. Quarterly cohort analysis puts the repeat rates at 20 to 25 per cent. The year the team stayed in Gurgaon, it ensured that hotel occupancies, reviews and repeat rates increased. After the market validation in Gurgaon, the team decided to scale up and from January 2015, began to expand to other cities, starting with Bengaluru, Mumbai and Delhi. By March 2015, OYO had already raised three rounds of investment -- from Lightspeed Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks Capital -- and by August 2015, raised another $100 million from Softbank. These investments went a long way in helping it scale rapidly across the country and even look at the Southeast Asian markets. By December 2015, OYO had touched 150 cities. The number of hotel tie-ups, a mere 72 that January, rose to 4,200 by the end of the year. The bookings saw a growth of close to 110x. But such overwhelming scale and pace brought their own challenges and OYO began face problems and rising customer complaints. Competition snapping at the heels Simultaneously, from being one of the earliest players in the market, today it has stiff competition from other brands like Zip Rooms, Treebo Hotels, Stayzilla and even from Paytm, which is now entering the last-minute hotel booking space. These players are not only giving OYO a run for its money but are also making biggies like MakeMyTrip and Goibibo sit up and take
notice. With rising competition, many players are now realising the need to go that extra mile to impress customers with value and service. Zip Rooms, for example invested considerably in training and monitoring hotel staff and management. Treebo Hotels has a ‘Friends of Treebo’ system, a crowdsourced quality audit program which includes students, travellers, corporates, and even freelancers, who can conduct a mystery audit on any of its properties and give the feedback to the team. MakeMyTrip has gone that extra mile by creating a dedicated Value+ category to go head-to-head with these newage brands. All the more reason for OYO to focus on customer service. The curious case of room shifts One of the common complaints was shifting of rooms. Customers would say when they went to the hotel they did not get the room they were promised, admits Ritesh. The team saw that close to 3.8 per cent of the total customer base had been shifted to another room, or had got one that wasn’t standardised as per OYO’s requirements.
The three core promises OYO upholds are ‘Availability, Predictability and Affordability’ and two of them weren’t being upheld. So in order to standardise the process, the team went back to the drawing board. The purging process: shutting out 200 hotels The team realised that close to seven to eight percent of the hotels, which took in 10 to 15 percent of the business, had 95 per cent of the complaints. “We felt that the easiest way to solve the problem was churn these guys out,” says Ritesh. The team built a 3C (3 Crosses) scoring system, which measures complaints-based weightages. Each complaint against a hotel is given a cross basis the weightage given. If a hotel gets 20 crosses, it is removed from OYO’s system. For example, Ritesh says, shifting a room is the biggest complaint with the highest weightage, and it gets saddled with four crosses. So if a hotel gets the same complaint five times, it
is removed from the system. There are different deltas for each issue. Like, say, unclean rooms get between 3.5 and 4 crosses. With this 3C audit process in place, OYO Rooms today has shut out close to 200 hotels across the country. Technology and data to the aid With the aid of technology, the team does a root-cause analysis and educates hotel owners how mistakes can be rectified. There is an auditor for every 40 hotels, and each property goes through a strict audit every three to four days on a 30-point checklist. Each auditor has a dedicated app garnering intelligence from occupancy reports and customer feedback and tells these auditors what to do on a day-to-day basis. The auditor cannot file his/her report on the app until and unless he/she is on the geo-fencing of the hotel. Audit timings aren’t fixed. Even as the fixes on the hotel and property side were being made, the team realised that customer service challenges needed to be addressed immediately. To ensure this, it began to keep a closer watch on the hotels, checking the number of calls made each day, the number of issues resolved and those that weren’t and why. Tipping the domino After mapping every room and a 100 percent re-audit, the team has marked rooms that aren’t standardised, ensuring they’re not made available to guests. So now on the mobile app, people have an option of various different rooms while these ‘black rooms’ cannot be chosen. Explaining this experience, Ritesh says that if the hotel has agreed to a green room 104 but gives the guest a black room 105, within 10 minutes the guest gets an SMS that states, ‘OYO is happy to host you in room 104 and we hope you’ve checked into your room. If not, please give us a missed call on the number.’ If the guest gives a missed call, the hotel is marked and crosses given under the audit. The auditor nearest responds immediately and helps the guest check into the right room. Challenges of scale
The challenge of scale, however, was multi-pronged for OYO. The team started to notice that towards 2015 end, newer hotel owners, unlike their early predecessors, began to view the aggregator as a commercial partner. This meant that the team had to work even on the hotel owners’ side. So it began by holding celebration programmes with all staff whenever any hotel touched the 100-day mark of partnership. All this, say Ritesh and Abhinav, helps build great chemistry both internally and with the partners. OYO is now building a stronger focus on technology and using data to create better customer experience. Its mobile app, available on Google Play Store, already has one to five million downloads OYO is now eyeing the Southeast Asian markets and plans to penetrate deeper into different levels of hotel experiences and services. Says Ritesh, We’ve made mistakes and, yes, there are issues. In hospitality, there are some very tough and subjective issues: the whiteness of the sheets and even water temperature. We as entrepreneurs take these very seriously and are working to ensure that the customers get the best experience. There were mistakes made; we accept them and are ready to resolve them and change. Our focus even today remains on ensuring a traveller gets a decent budget hotel stay experience in every corner of India.
hospitality in India has seen the budget-hotel segment grow and make its mark on the industry. The entry of OYO Rooms has been a game-changer, giving birth to a whole new industry, and organising properties within this segment. This has helped highlight the value of independently run hotel businesses. Never before has the country’s hospitality industry witnessed such a surge in the growth of these ‘budget brands’. It is the sudden influx of these ‘budget brands’ that has ignited the growth of this sector, fuelled by the drastic, almost unrealistic pricing that they have introduced. Domestic tourism has especially benefitted from this and has been growing
steadily from 2014, with the number of trips increasing by 12 per cent. India is beginning to witness an increasing interest in internal tourism, as a younger generation of travellers begin to dictate trends in the country. This is a direct consequence of the growth of smaller segments and businesses within hospitality. To take their business to the next level, these brands need to implement stringent quality standards and focus on the guest experience. OYO Rooms aims to provide a standardised experience to people across the country when they are away from home. An obviously proud Shrey shares that in 18 months OYO Rooms has scaled from 12 hotels with 200 odd rooms in one city, to over 3,500 hotels and 40,000 rooms across over 150 cities. They have also launched OYO WE exclusively for women. “These 18 months have been nothing short of inspiring,” says Shrey. Life’s milestones In the largest funding round to date for a Thiel Fellow project, Ritesh Agarwal has raised $25 million from Lightspeed, Sequoia and others to build a branded budget hotel network across India. Called OYO Rooms, the company partners with property owners across India and makes sure that their facilities meet a baseline of requirements from linen quality to breakfast to Internet access for a starting price of 999 rupees or $16 a night. The company, which has booked around 60,000 stays (Update: per month) since starting almost two years ago, works with each partner hotel to improve their facilities over the span of a week before launching on the platform. Agarwal got his start programming when he was in third grade and he began living out of bed-and-breakfasts regularly before starting OYO. In that year of traveling across India, he realized how difficult it was to get any kind of consistency. “The sockets wouldn’t be working. Or you couldn’t pay by card the next morning,” Agarwal said. “With OYO, you know exactly what you’re going to get.” Agarwal’s big round comes at a time when the Indian consumer Internet market is finally flourishing after the country has served as a B2B or outsourcing platform for decades. He decided to become a consumer Internet entrepreneur around the time that Flipkart and Snapdeal were founded. Both are now two of India’s “unicorns,” or web companies valued at well over $1 billion each. “India was seeing its first iteration of high quality entrepreneurs,” he said. “It’s exciting times for startups here.”
OYO is India’s largest branded network of hotels founded by Ritesh Agarwal, India’s first graduate of the Thiel Fellowship, a program started by Paypal founder, Peter Thiel. OYO currently operates in India & Malaysia with over 200+ locations including Delhi, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Goa, Chennai, Kolkata and Kuala Lumpur. OYO’s presence includes major metros, regional hubs, top leisure destinations, as well as pilgrimage towns. The company’s vision is to become the most preferred and trusted hotel brand for both customers as well as partner owners and is backed by the world’s leading investors including the SoftBank Group, Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed India. OYO promises comfortable premium delightful stays with features such as an air conditioned room, complimentary breakfast, and Wi-Fi with 24x7 customer service support. Guests can use the OYO app (over 5 MILLION downloads) for booking rooms as well as order beverages and request room service along with booking a cab and searching nearby restaurants. Hotel owners who partner with OYO see a significant increase in occupancy levels, get access to the world’s first tablet based property management apps and become part of a brand that is recognized and most loved by travelers nationwide. OYO has received several national and international accolades including Business World Young Entrepreneur Award, TiE Lumis Business Excellence Awards, India International Travel Mart Award, Startup of the Year- Express IT Award and Lufthansa ET Now Runway to Success Award. Specialties Budget Hotels, Long Stays, Suites, Premium Hotels, Elite Hotels, Women Exclusive Hotels
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Website
http://www.oyorooms.com
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Industry
Hospitality
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Type
Privately Held
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Headquarters
325, Spaze i Tech Park, Tower II,Sohna Road Gurgaon, Delhi122002 India
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Company Size
1001-5000 employees
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Founded
2013
We are India's largest branded network of hotels spread across 223 cities with 6500+ hotels offering standardized stay experiences at an unmatched price.
Standardized OYO Rooms promises to provide the same amenities and the same awesome experience across all its rooms. Affordable OYO offers rooms at prices that no other player in the budget segment offers today.
Technology Driven OYO uses technology to link all its functions and provide the customer a seamless awesome experience. OYO Rooms is an Indian brand started with the goal to “change the way people stay away from home”. The company was founded by Ritesh Agarwal,the first Indian to win the Thiel Fellowship. At present, OYO Rooms is India’s largest branded network of hotels spread across 175 cities with 5000+ hotels offering standardised stay experiences at an unmatched price.
ABOUT THE FOUNDER itesh Agarwal, Founder of OYO Rooms, was born and raised in a middle-class family in Cuttack (Odisha). After finishing class 12th, he enrolled in Indian School of Business & Finance, Delhi. However, he didn’t continue with his college education and dropped out to start his own company without his family knowing of this move. His various stay experiences at budget accommodations inspired him to launch Oravel Stays in 2012. Oravel was modelled after Airbnb. By 2013, he pivoted Oravel Stays into OYO Rooms. In the same year, Agarwal was selected for the Thiel Fellowship. The fellowship created by PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, provides $100,000 to college drop-outs under 22 years of age to pursue their idea. Agarwal is the first resident Indian Thiel fellow.
THE GROWTH STORY Oyo rooms official website From
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hotel
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5000+ hotels at present, OYO Rooms have reached several milestones. OYO Rooms started with 1 city and 1 hotel (OYO Rooms Huda City Centre) in Gurgaon in May 2013 and has seen a tremendous growth. The company as of April 2016 has 5,000+ hotels (more than 100,000 rooms) in 175 cities of India. OYO Rooms has been named India’s largest budget hotel chain. Recently, OYO launched in Malaysia.
BUSINESS MODEL OYO Rooms makes a partnership with hotels aiming standard facilities to be provided in the hotels. Standard facilities like WiFi, Television, Comfy bed, Proper sanitation of room and lavatories, meals and other facilities are strictly taken care of when OYO Rooms partners with the hotels. The standards are audited every few days so that the customers are assured of quality experience at an affordable price ranging between INR 999 to INR 12,000.
FUNDING OYO Rooms got its first round of funding from Venture Nursery in December 2012. Then another round of funding came from Lightspeed Ventures in February 2014. In March 2015, OYO Rooms raised $25 million from Lightspeed, Sequoia and others. After that in July 2015, OYO Rooms raised $100 million from SoftBank. Again in April 2016, OYO Rooms raised 100$ million from SoftBank, thus making it’s valuation at more than 225$ million, hence ranking it in one of the top 5 startups in India.
THE MAKING OF THE OYO APP imobdevtech
OYO Rooms started working on their mobile app in March 2015 and the first version of it was launched on April 22,2015 on the Android Play Store. The iOS version went live on 1st May, 2015 on the App Store. Later, they kept on adding more features and have grown to over 2 million downloads in less than 7 months of its launch and a significant share of their business now comes through it. The OYO app allows you to make a booking in just 3 taps.
MAJOR PARTNERSHIPS OF OYO ROOMS •
OLA Cabs: This partnership between the two emerging companies may be called as The Partnership of the Year. Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO of OYO Rooms, says, “This partnership will transform the hospitality industry by making it mobile. We wanted to solve a real problem – the problem of booking rooms while on the go. Customers can now seamlessly get the services of Ola Rooms supported by the cutting-edge technology of the OYO App.” This association, between OYO and Ola, is being touted as the most innovative and game-changing partnership of 2016 by the experts.
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Biotique: After a long search for a brand which matches their promise of quality, they have partnered with Biotique. Now every OYO room is equipped with Biotique toiletries perfect for a contemporary, quality conscious traveller. Biotique products are Ayurvedic i.e. they are made with 100% natural ingredients with no chemicals, no preservatives, and no animal testing.
WHY THE HOTEL OWNERS ARE LOVING OYO ROOMS •
Transparency: With tools like the specially designed owner portal and by providing Property Manager tabs to hotels the company makes sure that the partners are aware of everything no matter which part of the world they are in.
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Assistance: The moment a hotel gets on board with OYO Rooms they assist in upgrading the property to match the OYO standard.
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Timely Payments: The company pays their partners on a weekly basis and ensure that no capital of the hotel gets stuck.
GOVERNMENT PACTS WITH OYO ROOMS •
A MoU between OYO Rooms and Tourism and Hospitality Skill Council (THSC), Government of India, was signed to train three lakhs workers across 150+ cities in the next three years at the 4th National Conference on Skill Development 2015 on 27th November 2015.
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The commpany has also associated with 7 state governments under various initiatives to strengthen our objective to ensure that people employed in unorganised segments can access growth opportunities through up-skilling/re-skilling and recognition of prior learning.
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OYO Rooms has been accredited by THSC under the aegis of National Skill and Development Council, Govt. of India, as an official training partner in hospitality. #OYOforSkillIndia, an initiative from OYO Rooms, is a small contribution in transforming India through innovation.
AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
TO THE COMPANY: •
Express IT Awards – Start-up of the Year
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India International Travel Mart Award
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Lufthansa ET Now Runway to Success Award
TO THE FOUNDER: •
Forbes ’30 under 30′ in the consumer tech sector
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First resident Asian to win Thiel Fellowship, 2013
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Top 50 Entrepreneurs in 2013 by TATA First Dot powered by NEN Awards
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Named as one of the ‘8 Hottest Teenage Start-Up Founders in the World’ in 2013 by Business Insider
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TiE-Lumis Entrepreneurial Excellence Award in 2014
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Business World Young Entrepreneur Award in 2015.
Sources: Wikipedia, Economic Times,OYORooms
OYO ROOMS : HOW RITESH AGARWAL STARTED THE COMPANY Naushir Miraz | April 18, 2016 | Stories | No Comments
ABOUT THE FOUNDER It was when he was 18 that he founded Oravel Stays, which was building the Indian version of home sharing portal AirBnB. Agarwal got in touch with accelerator VentureNursery, flew down to Mumbai and got seed funding of around Rs 30 lakh after a three-month programme. Agarwal, who stayed at over 100 bed-and-breakfast rooms while running Oravel, soon discovered that the problem for these portals was not discovery. "The big problem was that these portals are not standardised," said Agarwal. It was around the same time that Agarwal became the first Indian to be chosen for Thiel Fellowship, where he was given $100,000 grant by early Facebook investor and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel. The fellowship is given to entrepreneurs below 20 years of age who skip college for two years to start running their own business. "One big learning from Thiel fellowship was think really big and create an impact, without thinking if anybody has done it before," said Agarwal, who decided to pivot the model to OYO Rooms, putting most of the Thiel grant into the business. And investors feel that Agarwal has the maturity to build an organisation and execution capabilities. "I always thought Ritesh was unusual for his age (or any age) in terms of his clarity of thought and purpose. He embraces the concept of hiring people better than him and giving them
the freedom to contribute," said Somaia, adding that experienced founders also struggle with this.
The full form of OYO is said to be On Your Own which the founder thought attractive
Interesting facts about Ritesh Agarwal • Ritesh Agarwal Oyo Rooms founder is the first Indian resident to win the Thiel Fellowship which is a coveted scholarship award. • He was named in the Forbes list of 30 under 30 in the consumer tech sector which in itself is such a great venture. • He received the business world young entrepreneur award in the year 2015. • He is constantly ranked in the top 10 Indian entrepreneurs in various lists hree years ago, Agarwal founded Oravel, a clone of peer-to-peer lodging website Airbnb. He then received a Thiel Fellowship that paid him $100,000 over two years to create a start-up. He pivoted to a new business model called Oyo Rooms, a marketplace for branded budget hotels in southeast Asia. Oyo Rooms is an Indian virtual hospitality brand. It aggregates budget hotels and guesthouses, making inventory discoverable and bookable online. Its branding provides a franchise-like consistency of product. It’s a managed marketplace of properties. In December 2012, Oyo Rooms received seed funding. This was followed in July 2013 by more seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners (LSVP) and DSG Consumer Partners. In May 2014 it received about $650,000 from Sequoia Capital and LSVP at a pre-money valuation of $60 million. itesh Agarwal is the founder and CEO of OYO. He launched his first start‐up, Oravel Stays Pvt. Ltd. in 2012.[1] Oravel was designed as a platform for booking budget and premium accommodations. Realizing the great variability in the budget sector, he pivoted Oravel to OYO in 2013.[2] OYO started with 1 city and 1 hotel in Gurgaon in January 2013. The company as of November 2015 has around 15,000 hotels in 250 cities of India, [3] and has been named India's largest budget hotel chain.[4] It has also launched in Malaysia.[5][6]
, 10 MAY 2016
According a recent report shared by the OYO Rooms team, the company claims to have reached a unit level profitability, which means, on an average, they are making profit on every room sold. Currently, the average booking rates of the rooms range from Rs 1,400 to 1,800. Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO of OYO, says that their team has delivered a 15x YoY growth with 2.3 million booked room-night transactions in the first quarter of 2016. Ritesh added that over 95 per cent of their traffic comes via their own sales channels. Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Gurgaon are believed to be the key cities driving profitability. The team now plans to grow deeper in their key business and triple their inventory by the end of this year. In the recent past, as an answer to the different customer complaints that were raised against the budget hotel aggregator, the team had taken a step back and worked out on weeding out the unnecessary and built strong technical and manpower backing to deal with the issues. Today OYO has clocked over five million app downloads. In January, the team also launched OYO Bazaar, a marketplace for hotel supplies in Delhi and Gurgaon. The key purpose of this initiative is to leverage its ability to generate bulk business and drive better cost-effectiveness for partners. OYO uses its platform to provide partner-hotels access to best quality products required for day-to-day running of hotels. Ritesh adds that it takes away procurement hassles enabling the hotelier to focus on core hospitality business development. The SKUs were basically limited to the linen category only and as of March, the team launched a refurbished website in Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi. They added 10 suppliers and 180 SKU’s across linen-items, LED lights, and maintenance services. The team intends to make this platform a one-stop solution for hotels to order any item required for smooth operations. The number of SKUs listed in the platform is slated to touch 500 SKus in the next couple of months, and the category coverage will also increase to include cleaning supplies, crockery, bathroom wares, and room and kitchen appliances.
OYO Rooms sets up OYO Bazar, a one-stop shop for hotels to procure daily essentials Hotel room aggregator OYO Rooms is betting on online marketplace OYO Bazar, a one-stop shop for hotels to procure daily essentials required to run their business, to boost loyalty among its partners and maintain
margins. "As the market matures, hotel partners will look for more support from a single partner they work with. The intent is not to become an ecommerce company but to become a preferred supplier for our partners," said Ritesh Agarwal, chief executive of OYO Rooms. The idea behind the online marketplace is to help retain hotel partners and enable long-term value, he said. The company wants to leverage bulk sourcing capabilities and bargaining power to provide inventory to hotels at prices that are 20-25% cheaper than market rates while generating 20-25% margins for itself in the process. It has a network of more than 5,500 hotel partners and its margins range between 15-20% per hotel partner. "Our margins are healthy .. enough to hit profitability but to continue to grow and maintain our partnerships with hotels, we need to expand our services," Agarwal said.
About 10 vendors have signed agreements with OYO Bazar for providing hotel supplies in a certain price range, maintain quality standards and deliver products to hotels on time. OYO Rooms' preferred logistics partners or the vendors themselves will take care of the logistics, executives said. The company is also planning to expand to other businesses such as providing loans to hotel partners, for which it is in talks with financial services providers. oyo Bazar was launched in March with 180 stock keeping units or SKUs in three product categories - linen, maintenance services and LED lights - and was initially piloted in Delhi and Gurgaon. The company plans to expand the online marketplace to 500 SKUs in the next two months with more products such as cleaning supplies, crockery, bathroom wares and room and kitchen appliances.
OYO opens Gurgaon campus, plans to launch a skill training centre By Shubhra Pant, TNN | Sep 06, 2016, 01.59 PM IST Less than a year after online marketplace Snapdeal inaugurated its headquarters in Gurgaon, budget hotel aggregator OYO Rooms opened its campus in the city on Monday. Founder & CEO of OYO, Ritesh Agarwal, said the startup will also open a skill training institute in Gurgaon to train and certify workers in the hospitality industry. The main office will house 2,000 employees presently. "We have established a skill training institute which will provide a platform for r .. recognition of prior learning through informal and on-the-job learning," Agarwal said. He said OYO plans to train 1 lakh people, creating a pipeline of skilled workforce for the hospitality industry."
hat is OYO Rooms?
OYO Rooms is India's largest branded network of hotels offering standardized rooms in different locations across the country. How is OYO Rooms different from an online travel agent or an online marketplace of hotel rooms? When you book OYO Rooms, you get a guaranteed amazing OYO experience across all hotels under the OYO Rooms network unlike an online marketplace where the end-user experience is not standardized. In short, when you book OYO Rooms, you get to stay in OYO Rooms and not any random XYZ hotel. How big is the OYO Rooms network? The network of branded hotels currently includes over 6500+ hotels spread across 224 cities with more cities and hotels planned to come up very soon. What are the key features of 'standardized' OYO Rooms? The key features include AC rooms with TV, spotless linen, complimentary breakfast, free Wi-Fi and hygienic washrooms. We also provide a toiletries kit in each room. How much does an OYO cost? Are there any hidden charges to be paid? Rooms start at Rs 999 only with no hidden charges. How can one book an OYO? OYO Rooms can be booked in various ways including through the OYO Rooms app, through the www.oyorooms.com website and on phone by calling 9313931393. In addition, one can book OYO Rooms through any of our partner online travel agents. Does any payment need to be made at the time of booking? Customers have the option to either make an advance payment or pay at the hotel during check-out. How do I locate the OYO Rooms hotel I have booked? There are many ways to locate your OYO – • On the app, please tap on "Get Directions" on the "Upcoming Booking" card. • After a booking is created, you will receive an e-mail with the address of the property. • After a booking is created you will receive a confirmation SMS that has a map link of the OYO booked as well the address of the OYO property. • You will also receive an SMS with directions to reach the hotel booked on the day of the check-in. What are the standard check-in and check-out times? The standard check-in time is 12 PM and the standard check-out time is 11 AM. Can I get my booking revised? Of course! Simply call us at 9313931393 and our customer care representative will assist you with the revised booking. Can I get my booking cancelled?
You can cancel your booking using our website or mobile app. You can also call us on +91-9313931393 to cancel your booking. The applicable refund amount will be credited to you within 4 working days. However, it may take an additional 3-14 working days to reflect in your account, depending on the processing time taken by your bank. What documents do I need to carry to the hotel to ensure a quick check-in? You need to carry the confirmation e-mail/ booking ID sent to you at the time of booking and any of your ID proofs that should have your address and photograph. These include your passport, Aadhaar card, driving license and voter's ID card. Please note that PAN card does not qualify as an acceptable ID proof. I intend to stay at OYO Rooms for a long period. Am I eligible for any special discounts? You could be eligible for a special discount based on the duration of your stay. Please send an e-mail to
[email protected] or call 93 13 93 13 93 for details.
Terms & Conditions of use This website www.oyorooms.com ("Website") and its mobile application ("Application") are owned and operated by Oravel Stays Private Limited ("OYO Rooms"), a company incorporated under the laws of India, having its registered place of business at Delhi Rectangle Regus, Level 4, Rectangle 1, Commercial Complex D-4, Saket, New Delhi - 11017, India and its corporate office at 6th Floor, Spaze Itech Park, Tower B3, Sector 49, Sohna Road, Gurgaon – 122018, Haryana, India, which enables the user of the Website to connect with independent third party hotel owners ("Channel Partner") offering renting of various guest houses/ hotels/ accommodations listed on the Website/ Application ("Services").
Conditions 1. MEMBERSHIP ELIGIBILITY
Membership on the Website/Application is free. The User agrees and acknowledges that this Website/ Application can be used only by individuals who are of legal age (at least 18 (eighteen) years of age) to form a binding contract under the laws as applicable in India OYO Rooms reserves the right to terminate User’s access to and refuse to provide User with access to the Website/ Application if OYO Rooms discovers that User is under the age of 18 OYO Rooms shall not be responsible and shall not be required to mediate or resolve any dispute or disagreement between User and Channel Partner. In no event, shall OYO Rooms be made a party to dispute between User(s) and Channel Partner(s). OYO acquires rival ZO Rooms By Pranbihanga Borpuzari, ET Bureau | Feb 10, 2016, 06.13 PM IST
In a consolidation of business in the hotel aggregation segment, OYO Rooms has acquired its rival Delhibased ZO rooms. There is no official statement, but OYO's investor Softbank has confirmed in an earning presentation earlier today that the deal is through. Earlier in the day the ZO Rooms website and app had stopped functioning, sparking rumors that the deal has gone been clinched. At the moment both the site and the app is functioning normally. In August 2015, SoftB .. SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Ventures and Green Oaks capital, invested $ 100 million in OYO Rooms, that catapulted it to the big league. Tiger-backed ZO rooms has raised about $ 47 million and had struggled recently to raise another round.
OYO Rooms goes international; launches operations in Malaysia By Divya Sathyanarayanan, ET Bureau | Jan 12, 2016, 12.36 PM IST MUMBAI: Hotel aggregator OYO Rooms has forayed into south-east Asia through the launch of its operations in Malaysia. The startup has aggressively scaled its presence in India to offers 40,000 rooms. "Malaysia is our first port-of-call given the attractive characteristics of the market such as higher-thanaverage mobile penetration and a large internet population," Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO, OYO Rooms said in a press statement. "Unbranded hotel room supply accounts for a major .. of hotel supply worldwide.. OYO's model is suitable for markets with large share of unbranded budget supply such as South-East Asia, Africa and South America." The startup, founded three years ago by college dropout Ritesh Agarwal, aggregates and organizes hotels in various cities to ensure that across the brand guests have a quality and standardised experience, and typically charges around Rs 1,000 a night. Hotels converting to the OYO brand get demand from the startup's aggregated .. Read more at: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/50543561.cms? utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
SoftBank pays Rs 413cr for extra room at OYO By ET Bureau | Aug 17, 2016, 08.23 AM IST Japanese internet and telecom firm SoftBank has led a new round of funding in budget hotels brand OYO Rooms. An existing shareholder in the company, SoftBank invested.Rs 413 crore through a proposed rights issue last month, according to documents filed with the Registrar of Companies. The new round of funding will peg the post-money valuation of the Gurgaon-based startup at Rs 3,129 crore or about $460 million. The capital infusion is expected to be used by OYO Rooms to expand its n .. its new initiative called 'Flagship', where it controls 100% of the inventory of the hotel under this category to provide a more premium experience to customers. The other investors in this round included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks Capital and DSG Consumer Partners. SoftBank declined to comment on the development while OYO Rooms' spokesperson could not be reached.
Besides the new funding, OYO Rooms has bought back shares worth Rs 60 crore from its early . Rs 60 crore from its early angel investors led by VentureNursery. The Mumbai-based accelerator had invested about Rs 25 lakh in the company in 2012, and has made about 250 times returns from its early bet, one of the angels involved in the deal told ET on condition of anonymity. ET had reported on April 13 that Venture-Nursery, a Mumbai-based accelerator which was the first investor in OYO Rooms, was looking for an exit and that differences had emerged due to it. OYO Rooms, founded .. by 21-year-old Ritesh Agarwal, had raised $100 million in the previous round of funding in August 2015 led by SoftBank. The company was then valued at $400 million post-money while the new round of the company has been raised at $400 million pre-money. The financing round reflects sobering sentiment around thge high valuation of Indian internet companies. Unmarried couples can book Oyo Rooms now By Shalina Pillai & Digbijay Mishra, TNN | Aug 27,
The Business Model Of OYO Rooms : OYO Rooms claims to be a branded network of budget hotels and thus different from other hotel aggregators and OTAs (Online Travel Agents) such as Goibibo, Makemytrip, Cleartrip, Yatra etc. The business model of hotel aggregators is simple as they simply connect the guest (customer) with the hotel by listing hotels on their website and take a commission as their revenue. Many a times they work out on a deal with the hotels with a minimum order guarantee per month and hence are able to provide discounted rates and deals on the room rates compared to the rates provided by the hotels directly to a normal guest. This makes them lucrative for guests. The way OYO Rooms operates is different from OTAs since they focus on cobranding. They are saying that they partner with zero to 2 star hotels and even guest houses, ‘standardize’ them and bring them customers through their site and apps.
OYO Rooms is an online aggregator of budget hotels. OYO Rooms partners with hotels with the aim of standardization on various measures in each room including free wifi and breakfast, flatscreen TVs, spotless white bed linen of a certain thread count, branded toiletries, 6-inch shower heads, a beverage tray and so on. The standards are audited every few days so that the customers are assured a quality experience. OYO’s budget stays range from 999 ($16) to 4,000 rupees ($66). OYO provides property owners with support such as quality standardized supplies and service training. OYO boasts of a 24x7 in-house customer service center.However recently OYO has changed its policy and allow you to spend only 25% of your hard earned referral money when you book a hotel, the rest must be paid by the guest from his pocket, a complete "U-turn" from their initial model.
OYO Rooms is an online aggregator of hotels. It does not own the hotels but lists them under its name. It has created a brand value for itself by assuring minimum standards to the customers. It has also created a market place for itself via various channels like- app, call centre, Online travel agencies, sales team, Travel agents etc. Its both a win win situation for hotel owners,customers and OYO. Hotel owners get a brand name, marketing, sales etc. Customers get a standardised stay and OYO is able to multiply hotels into its platform in a lightning pace. Its different from other portals as it provides a standarised stay and owns the experience of the customer rather than owning the inventory. Its similar to OLA and Uber in many ways. In long run OYO will have a pricing model as OLA, owners have to pay commission for OYO's brand. Prices are controlled by OYO, hence they can increase the prices after customer and hotel acquisition.
main thing comes now onwards OYO has officially launched ‘relationship mode’ for unmarried couples to spend some ‘private time’.
You can now easily find couple-friendly OYO hotels in a particular city by applying the filter on the app or website, and also by turning on the “relationship mode” feature in your OYO account. This ensures that you do not face pesky interrogation or needless hassle when you arrive at your hotel. All you need is a local ID to check-in (via). The USP of Oyo Rooms, the online hotel aggregator led by 23-year-old Ritesh Agarwal, has been its low tariff. That however was also a hurdle for the company, backed by marquee investors such as Softbank, Sequoia, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital and others, in turning in profits. Analysts have maintained that Oyo must raise the tariff to become a unicorn and also profitable. Agarwal has heard them, and is now trying to strike a balance.
In the backdrop of funds marking down their investments in top-notch start-ups, Oyo being no exception, Agarwal is keen to tap high-value travellers for its premium services, a category which is expected to fetch higher returns than the regular rooms.
Read more from our special coverage on "OYO ROOMS" Oyo plans to re-engage with unhappy users
Can Oyo find room to grow? OYO Rooms partners PayPal for global payments, bookings OYO is both Amazon and Uber of the hospitality world: Ritesh Agarwal
So far, Oyo hard-sold a list of musts in the hotel rooms booked through its platform. These included clean washrooms, Wi-Fi, air-conditioned rooms, and complimentary breakfast, the tariff for which was capped at Rs 2,500. Among others, many hotels with which Oyo has partnered argue that this tariff is fine during the lean season but not when tourists show up in large numbers during holidays.
FACT FILE It started operations in 2013
It has over 63,000 rooms across 5,500 hotels in 170+ cities
Branded hotel rooms in India as of March 2015 were 112,284
It launched operations in Malaysia in January 2016
Oyo's turnover was Rs 2.4 crore in 2014-15
It has raised $225.65 million so far
The room aggregator is in the market to raise $400 million, but may have to make do with less Source: Company, Crunchbase This is where Oyo's premium services fit in. The country's largest hotel
aggregator has brought on board boutique hotels and service apartments to vie for the market share of three- and four-star hotels, a segment that is growing at a fast clip in India.
The new category is called Oyo Flagship and will be targeted at those who are willing to stretch their budget for more than just the basic comforts of clean sheets and a hot shower. Oyo plans to take some of these properties on lease and some on a revenue-share model.
Ritesh Agarwal "We want to offer an upmarket customer service to discerning guests who are looking for a value experience," says Agarwal.
In three years since its launch in 2013, Oyo has grown to become the largest branded hotel aggregator in India, operating through a network of 5,500 hotels in over 170 Indian cities. With an inventory of over 63,000 rooms, Oyo has recorded a million check-ins over the past year.
Currently, Oyo provides basic rooms under the Oyo Rooms brand and a slightly higher category through Oyo Premier. That's not enough, Oyo realises.
The new business will serve people who are increasingly drawn to Oyo but whose needs currently are not met by the services provided by it. "The brand looked good and a very different set of people started using Oyo and they expected more from us," says Agarwal.
Rising competition Operating in this segment, however, will not be without challenges. Unlike the mass market category which is largely unorganised, many wellentrenched hotel chains are keen to grow their three- and four-star networks. In addition, several large chains that traditionally operated fivestar hotels too are keen on expanding in the economy or budget category. French hospitality major Accor, for instance, is expanding its low-cost budget hotel chain Formule1. Similarly, Intercontinental Hotel Group is expanding the Holiday Inn Express, its budget arm.
For customers in this segment, there are plenty of options to choose from. Also, given the nature of the hospitality industry, Oyo will have to be extra careful in ensuring a uniform level of service across its hotel rooms. In the past, as it expanded its business rapidly, its quality did get compromised, resulting in several unsatisfied customers. The company has delisted 51 hotels this year from its network. Another 123 hotels from where complaints had come were put on one month's notice during which they were not allowed to take fresh Oyo bookings but only serve the earlier bookings.
"Based on their performance and servic we are allowing them to restart the bookings. We now have stricter clauses for them. If more than a couple of bad experiences come from a hotel, we will take them off our network," says Agarwal.
Going slow So far Oyo has been moving carefully in its new business. It has launched Oyo Flagship on a pilot basis in a few markets, including Delhi, Noida and Gurgaon. "We are not looking to scale up the Flagship segment immediately. It is a pilot. I am personally going to stay at almost every Flagship to ensure the quality," says Agarwal.
Oyo Flagship has a different business model than Oyo Rooms or Oyo Premier. At present, it blocks a certain percentage of rooms with a hotel and offers them under the Oyo platform. In the new business, the hotels will cater exclusively to Oyo.Another key difference will be the extent of control that Oyo will have on the hotels under its Flagship brand. Since such properties will cater exclusively to Oyo, the company can work towards ensuring a uniform experience across such properties. "These properties will have better interiors and staff. There will be investments to ensure that the infrastructure is good and staff is well-trained. There will be a fixed cost that we will bear but there will be greater control over the quality it will offer," he says.
Another challenge before Oyo is the steep discounting that has prevailed in the online travel booking space for a while. Flush with funds, travel portals like MakeMyTrip and Ibibo are offering discounts of up to 90 per cent on hotel bookings. In effect, you may end up getting a room priced at Rs 3,500 to Rs 4,000 for as low as Rs 1,500, including the taxes.
Agarwal is unhappy but is not worried. "There should not be such steep discounting. We can choose to discount our rooms in specific hotels or cities where aggression is required. We will deliver a better experience at attractive price points."
By diversifying its portfolio of rooms and tariffs, Oyo is perhaps readying for the next round of funding and a good valuation tag. Till a few months ago, it was believed to be eyeing a valuation of around $600 million, not too far away from being a unicorn.
The Ritesh Agarwal-led hotel aggregator major Oyo Rooms may soon close a merger with Zo Rooms after months of delay.
The deal, announced earlier this year, is pending for want of funds. This will change after Japan’s SoftBank recently pumped $61 million into Oyo Rooms.
Sources said the sixth round of funding was divided in two tranches with $29 million coming in as a mix of equity and debt. Oyo Rooms declined to comment on the matter.
This is among SoftBank’s first major funding rounds in its Indian portfolio after Nikesh Arora’s exit from the company where he served as president. Before stepping down, Arora had named Oyo Rooms as among SoftBank’s good investments.
According to documents filed with the Registrar of Companies by Oravel Stays Pvt Ltd, the company that owns Oyo Rooms, its existing investors Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners did not participate in this round of funding.
According to industry experts, after the Zo Rooms acquisition, Tiger Global, one of its main investors, may come on board as an investor in Oyo Rooms.
“Oyo Rooms will now aim at being the biggest hotel aggregator in India and compete with companies like MakeMyTrip. Next year, Oyo Rooms may go in for a bigger funding round,” said a source close to the company.
Oyo Rooms has been in the market for funds for a few months but investors have been playing it cool after a rush of funding rounds last year. Sources said Oyo Rooms’ valuation after the latest round of funding was $650-$700 million.
The company had last year raised $100 million from SoftBank, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital India and Greenoaks Capital. In April this year, Oyo Rooms raised another $100 million from SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, DSG Consumer Partners and Venture Nursery.
Oyo Rooms had said in May it had achieved unit profitability at an aggregate level in 170 cities.
“Our team delivered 15x year-on- year growth with 2.3 million booked room-night transactions in January-March 2016 while our gross merchandise value continues to grow aggressively every month. The cities driving profitability include Gurgaon, Delhi, Hyderabad and Kolkata,” Agarwal had said then.
Oyo Rooms has 5,855 hotels in its network with an inventory of 68,300 rooms. It aims to triple this inventory by December.
he red logo of Oyo Rooms, the hotel aggregator led by 23-year-old Ritesh Agarwal, shows up almost anywhere you go in the country, across neon-lit high streets as well as in little-known nooks and corners of more than 170 cities, from Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru to Mirik, Baddi, Coonoor and beyond. Oyo, described as On Your Own in online dictionaries, calls itself the largest branded network of hotels, though its
claim has often been slammed on Facebook and Twitter by critics. BIG BUSINESS 50,000 rooms under Oyo brand in tie-up with 5,500 hotels The Taj group has 16,500 rooms globally, of which 13,000 are in India Total number of branded hotel rooms in India as of March 2015 was 112,284 Oyo's turnover in 2014-15 was Rs 2.4 crore The room aggregator is in the market to raise $400 million, but may have to make do with less Source: Industry estimates, Oyo Read more from our special coverage on "OYO ROOMS" OYO Rooms partners PayPal for global payments, bookings OYO is both Amazon and Uber of the hospitality world: Ritesh Agarwal
Agarwal, a college dropout who started Oravel Stays, which owns Oyo, at age 17, insists such feedback is not more than a trickle. In a recent interview, he pointed out that Oyo got high ratings on sites such as Trip Advisor. Also, he claimed that more than 50 per cent of Oyo subscribers in Gurgaon were repeat customers. Oyo had blacklisted a few hotels over quality slippages, he said. But that's the least of the string of worries Agarwal faces: there is talk that Oyo's valuation has slid amid a global meltdown, its proposed acquisition of rival Zo Rooms may have tuned cold, and some of its partner hotels are ready to jump ship. Also, popular travel portals like Makemytrip, Yatra and Ibibo have struck Oyo off their listings as they prepare to enter the segment on their own. Though it is backed by marquee investors such as Softbank, Sequoia, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital and others, the buzz in the market is that Oyo will get much lower than the $400 million it had set out for not too long ago in its next round of funding. It was eyeing valuation of at least $600 million during the new fund-raising round, but that may have been ambitious. Valuation concerns This comes after Morgan Stanley marked down the value of its investment in Flipkart, the homegrown poster boy of e-commerce, by 27 per cent to $58.9 million between June and December. According to a recent survey of private equity and venture capital funds done by VCCircle, 92 per cent of VCs believe that valuations of start-ups going in for Series B, C or D rounds of funding will drop, which will make exits more difficult. Apart from slowing down expansion, this, experts say, could hurt Oyo's plans to acquire rival Zo Rooms for a stock swap of 7 per cent. One news report insists there is only 60 per cent chance of the deal getting completed because Zo has downsized significantly, which has made the shareholders of Oyo to rethink their decision. Oyo COO Abhinav Sinha says, "Fundraising has never been a challenge for Oyo….In the near future, at an apt time, we will actively engage in fund-raising.'' Dismissing any talk of valuation mark down, Sinha is confident that even in tough market conditions, an original disruptor like Oyo will be valued highly. On the Zo deal, Sinha is not so forthcoming. "At present, we have no comment to offer on this,'' he says. Things have changed for sure after Oyo entered a deal some months ago to acquire Tiger Global-backed hotel aggregator Zo, which had more than 10,000 rooms. That would have made Oyo stronger in the budget space. But both sides have maintained a cryptic silence, though Oyo's lead investor Softbank made the acquisition public in an investor presentation earlier this year. Partnership problems In addition, Oyo is getting blacklisted, going by a recent report. It said some 200 hotels terminated their relationship with aggregators such as Oyo and Zo over issues like undercutting, unpaid dues and unmet
promises. Sinha, for his part, dismisses it as "completely baseless''. The churn rate at Oyo "is extremely low'', Sinha says. "We have been expanding our network aggressively every month.'' Indeed, the partner network has grown at a fast clip. It now has tie-ups with more than 5,500 hotels, up from 2,500 hotels just six months ago. There are more than 50,000 rooms under the Oyo brand. It is this scale that makes Oyo look larger than the largest hospitality chain of India, Taj Hotels, which has around 16,500 rooms around the globe, of which 13,000 are in India. Sinha claims that Oyo's "partner hotels have witnessed increase in occupancy and quality of the property itself". Siddharth, who owns Daichi, a 12-room hotel in Dehradun, of which nine have been assigned to Oyo, says: "I have learnt a lot from this partnership.'' Gaurav Chhabra, who runs Regalia in Gurgaon and has given out a third of the 18-room property to Oyo, says the partnership has helped his business. The learnings are about basic hotel standards on everything from the thickness of mattress to quality of linen, size of picture in the room to the level of lighting. Oyo has a checklist of 200 that every hotel partner must adhere to. For instance, every Oyo room must have a runner over the bed to give it a premium touch, 24X7 free wi-fi is a must to make the deal attractive to a business traveller and complimentary breakfast has to be weaved in to make it a wholesome package. For tariff between Rs 999 and Rs 2,500, it may look like a steal to the guest, but hoteliers do feel the pinch. The tie-up looks good during the lean season, but the tariff in the peak season must be increased to make it a profitable business, point out both Sidhharth and Chhabra. Oyo, which on an average keeps around 15 per cent of the tariff as commission (though it could go up or down depending on a deal) while the remaining 85 per cent goes to the hotelier, is learnt to be open to the idea of variable tariff in the times to come. Oyo's turnover for 2014-15 was Rs 2.4 crore, up from Rs 51 lakh in the previous fiscal. To turn a unicorn and also profitable, it must up the tariff, points out an analyst. Some hotels have in fact already had their way and have breached the Oyo cap of Rs 2,500 to charge up to Rs 3,000 a night. Dynamic pricing based on demand, a norm in the hospitality industry, may follow, but for now Oyo's most attractive feature is its low price. It could keep the rates much lower than most others because the investment on properties has been borne by the hotels, and also Oyo didn't face much trouble in raising funds till now. But with the market turning tight, that could change in the future. In another development, travel portals such as MakeMyTrip, Yatra and Ibibo dropped Oyo a few months ago. Many of them are opening their own budget hotels and would like to promote those, rather than divert traffic to Oyo or Zo. That's a loss for an aggressive player like Oyo, which is currently getting as much as 90 per cent bookings through its direct transaction on the web and the mobile phone.
