Expressnews
Global hospitality technology major, OYO plans to significantly expand its leisure offering across key tourist hubs. Recreationaltravel has witnessed a major boom over the past few months, starting with the summer holidays. To tap into this segment, the company has targeted to add over 1000 hotels and homes (storefronts) in key leisure destinations across India. it has already added over 600 such storefronts on its platform by Sept 2022, In the run up to the upcoming peak season starting with the festivities and continuing with the winter break, OYO plans to add over 400 more storefronts by the end of the current calendar year.
OYO’s top leisure brands include 4ByOYO, 5ByOYO, OYO Townhouse, Townhouse OAK, Capital O and Collection O.
5ByOYO
The hospitality technology major is targeting around 19 core and emerging tourist destinations to expand its leisure property footprint across India. Fueled by the growing tourist demand, the company is focusing on key destinations such as Shimla, Amritsar, Udaipur, Goa, Mysore, Tirupati, Puri, Gangtok among others. OYO will consider factors such as proximity to key local tourist clusters and attractions while adding hotels and homes to its portfolio. OYO is focusing on traveler categories such as family groups, friends, pilgrim groups and kitchen tours – groups with specific food preference who travel with their own cooking arrangements.
Travel in India is back on track after two years of pandemic induced disruptions. As per the booking data studied by OYO between January 2022 – September 2022, there’s a steady uptick in leisure tourism between January-September 2022 vs. the same period last year. This growth is attributed to high consumer confidence combined with pent-up demand in travel which has given a significant impetus to domestic tourism across India. Within this period, the month of June 2022 saw the highest uptick in demand compared to last June, a time when states were just about opening their borders to tourists once again, but travel confidence was low.Furthermore, this month, airfare has risen nearly 40 percent as searches for domestic air travel tickets increased by 124 percent and 133 percent for international air travel from pre-pandemic levels, in India during the Diwali season.
Hotels and Homes in their leisure cities, signing up to partner with OYO have the option of joining the platform quickly and efficiently through ‘OYO 360’ – a self-on-boarding tool and website https://patron.oyorooms.com/in. Immediately, after joining through OYO 360, OYO’s Artificial Intelligence-enabled pricing software automatically drives the best booking prices on its app and website and across multiple channels including top Online Travel Agents such as MMT, Booking.com, Agoda, Yatra etc., based on room type, seasonality and other factors. This has led to storefronts joining OYO double their revenues on an average in 12 weeks of getting on to the platform.
OYO enables small and medium hospitality businesses by maximizing revenues through a slew of technological features, mainly through a single-one-stop-shop flagship app for these businesses – the CO-OYO app. OYO offers hotels access to a large base of regular customers through its app and website, and lists hotels on multiple Online Travel Agents (OTAs) to boost booking demand and, therefore, revenue. The company also helps ensure great experience for customers, with automated tools such as AI chatbots to quickly resolve customer queries, loyalty programmes and easy refunds when needed. Owing to these factors, a majority of OYO’s customers keep coming back to the platform, and over 80% of new customers discover local hotels through the OYO platform itself.
OYO had recently announced its expansion plans in South India as well. The hospitality company plans to increase its service base in the South by adding 600 storefronts. Currently, it operates around 1,350 properties across Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Puducherry.
Today, OYO is the third most downloaded travel app, globally. New hotels get access to OYO’s large customer base through its app and website, boasting 100mn+ downloads. A majority of these customers are based in India, parts of SE Asia and Europe. OYO has recently increased its focus on guest friendly features such as ‘Pay at Hotel’, which provides the flexibility to pay once the guest check-in to the property. It has also ensured easy cancellation policies and faster customer query resolution through automated tools such as Artificial Intelligence powered chatbots.
