Kahini Chakraborty – Mumbai

Started in the year 2012, OYORooms.com has massive expansion plans of building technologically enabled budget hotels on a pan-India basis. Presently, the company has more than 55 properties in Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida and Bengaluru. With an initial start of 11 rooms in 2012, the company is now selling on an average of 5,000 rooms every month. The company recently launched more properties- one in Bengaluru and two in Delhi and four in Mumbai. Providing ease of location is significantly high on the agenda for the company. Bullish about the company’s growth in the next five years, OYORooms.com is planning to establish approximately one lakh rooms inventory on a pan-India basis.

Speaking exclusively to Food & Hospitality World on the company’s expansion plans, Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO, OYORooms.com, said, “Our company is using technology to completely redefine the customer experience in the hospitality sector and deliver hassle-free experiences to budget travellers, starting from room availability and booking, through their stay and check-out. We are passionate about solving the problem of budget hotels and our intent is to deliver what we commit to customers. We are working on a hub-and-spoke model for our business expansion. Early this year we raised our seed capital which is in significant billion dollars from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Generally you run the business to make money, we work the other way round by making money so that we can run the business. We plan to open four-five hotels every month. On the business revenue generation, the company has done upwards of Rs 20 crore in the year.”

On the potential of investing in smaller cities, Agarwal opined, “Quality and standardisation of operations are available in metro cities but is not present in Tier II and Tier III cities. For us, this is a bigger growth driver and we have fundamentally seen the need for this requirement in these cities. As per our hub-and-spoke model, for us potential cities would be region specific- Mumbai-Pune, Nashik, Ahmedabad, Surat, Shirdi, Delhi-Chandigarh, Jaipur. Though we have internal targets, we have not set any specific hotel targets for specific markets.”