One and half a year ago, OYO Rooms entered Chinese market officially. The Indian hospitality focused startup stated that it operates more than 450,000 hotel rooms in China. It is the second biggest one in the country. And it plans on growing even bigger with recent ties with Ctrip.
Ctrip is one of the largest online travel agency in China. The strategic partnership is helping OYO on traffic exchange, data management and branding. The Indian startup made this announcement through its’ WeChat official account.
What is OYO Rooms?
Everything started from an Indian teenage boy. Ritesh Agarwal, only 18 at the time, founded Oravel Stays at 2012. It is a website similar to AIrbnb. In 2013, Agarwal changed it to OYO.
Starting from a small $100,000, OYO raised more and more money from various investor. After its’ most recent funding round, it has raised a total of $1.7 billion. The biggest and most recent investors including Softbank, Sequoia, Grab, Didi, and Airbnb.
The whole investment valued OYO in $5 billion by 2015. Beyond India, it is available in more than 500 cities across India, China, Malaysia, Nepal, UK, Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Philippines, Indonesia and Japan. It opererates more than 515,000 rooms, per January 2019.
After having its services available in UK, OYO is planning on expanding to more of the European market. Earlier this month, it announced an acquirement of Amsterdam-based vacation rental business, Leisure group. The acquirement was worth up to $415 M.
Initially, OYO has a rather similar model with Airbnb in providing cheap stays. But then it grew bigger to hospitality services including logistics and management.
In 2018, it came up with a new concept data which shares customer’s data to the government. The new data claimed to purposely protect the customers more.
However, for unmarried couples, which has larger portion in its customers list, it can be a minus. This is due to some countries’ rules that do not allow unmarried couples staying in one room.
Many enthusiasts have also criticized OYO Rooms’ overly aggressive strategy in the marketing section. They viewed it as an unfair way of removing competitors.
