London Stock Exchange-listed tourism company TUI has set its sight on the fast expanding Indian online travel market. It recently shut its business of distributing holiday packages and launched an online platform in early May for hotel and flight bookings and to compete with players such as MakeMyTrip and Yatra.

Having identified India, China and Brazil as future markets to gain significant share in the growing online travel bookings space, TUI Group has devised the ‘TUI 2022’ strategy. As part of this exercise, the Group’s subsidiary TUI India has been transformed to a digital provider exclusively focusing on the online business. Its website www.tui.in now allows Indian consumers to combine flight and hotel offerings within seconds. The change in approach is underpinned by the appointment of Krishan Singh as CEO of TUI India. Krishan joins TUI India from Yatra.com where he served as Senior Vice President.

With its TUI 2022 programme, the Group will achieve a fully digital market entry based on standardised, globally scalable and uniform software architecture in India, China and Brazil. By 2022, TUI Group aims to win additional turnover of EUR 1 billion and 1 million additional customers from these future markets.

TUI launched its classical tour operating business in India in 2005. The business has now been realigned to reflect India’s rapidly expanding Internet usage and significant growth of online travel bookings. In 2017 alone, revenue in the online travel booking market in India climbed by more than 30% year-on-year to USD 22.5 billion.

Alexander Linden, Director Future Markets, TUI Group, “India is one of our future markets to deliver additional growth for the TUI Group. Realigning the local business with a strong digital focus under our TUI brand offers enormous opportunities. I am happy to have Krishan and his team onboard, they will ensure business expansion and deliver future growth.”

The Indian online travel market has been seeing a rapid growth led by steep discounts and offers from market leaders such as MakeMyTrip and Yatra. While nobody else is making much money in the space, TUI is clear that it wants to have a sustainable and profitable Indian journey.

Besides selling hotels and flights, TUI will also focus on growing the flights-plus-hotels segment to short-haul destinations such as Singapore, Dubai and Mauritius.

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The hotel industry in India is going through a paradigm shift as several new-age companies are bringing budget hotels to the forefront. This rise can be attributed to a lot of factors – from a surge in disposable income to an increase in business and leisure travel, urbanisation, and the doubling of air travel over the past decade.

These trends, and more, have bolstered the mid-market brands in hospitality sector. It has also increased room inventory and created more competition in the market, prompting everyone operating in the segment to rethink their marketing strategies. Budget hotels chain FabHotels, is one such brand that aims to reach out to masses and rapidly expand across cities via its unique marketing efforts.

In order to achieve this goal, FabHotels has released its first-ever brand film that shows how a business traveller staying at FabHotels recharges and refreshes for his day. The campaign brings to life the brand’s promise of catering to new-age travellers and highlights the ease of stay, booking and standard amenities that all FabHotels rooms provide, anytime, anywhere.

The campaign is particularly targeted at business travellers. The tagline ‘#RechargeRefresh’ encapsulates the notion that FabHotels provides users with everything they need to prepare themselves for the daily battles that their corporate life throws at them. From great hospitality, to sumptuous food and a cozy stay to de-stress and relax – with this campaign, the brand is attempting to explain why business travellers should opt for FabHotels.

The minute-long video is upbeat and provides the right dose of inspiration, without becoming too preachy and, subtly incorporates the value that FabHotels provides. With close to two million views on YouTube, the ad film has managed to garner a lot of eyeballs already.

The film focuses on an individual use case, and as a category builder, it is a great move to tell people how and when they can use FabHotels. Even though the approach is targeted, the content and humor cuts across every age-group and category of travellers.

At TravHQ, we give this ad film a thumbs-up. Travel brands typically focus on leisure travellers, and there seems to be a rising need to delight the business traveller segment with some inspirational marketing. Business travel is a lucrative market, and for a brand like FabHotels, a marketing push like this could result in multiple and repeat bookings in future – reason enough to pay them more attention.

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Majority of Indians kickstart the final month of the year with festivities, music, and a pristine location that we’ve all become so familiar with – Goa. While everybody loves the popular beach town, not many people know their way around it. Latching on to this insight, budget hotel-room aggregator OYO launched its #StayYourWay campaign, creating a handy guide to give visitors to Goa a uniquely beautiful bird’s eye perspective of one the world’s best-loved beach destination.
OYO has partnered with award-winning London-based illustrator, designer and artist, Rod Hunt Illustration, to create an interactive map that is part information and part art. When a traveller chooses to #StayYourWay in Goa, they can navigate their way using this interactive map, explore Goa’s best-kept secrets that are just a few strides away, and also find a stay at the nearest OYO Home, another category that the aggregator has launched this year.

To boost the campaign’s reach, OYO launched a couple of contests for its followers across social media platforms. By answering a few simple questions about Goa and its locales, participants stand a chance to win many prizes, including the coveted iPhone X.

The interactive map has been chalked out in much detail and is easy to navigate. Irrespective of whether you are familiar with the city or not, the map provides a much-needed guide of popular eateries and beaches. The main focus of the map, however, is on the more than 500 OYO Homes that dot the entire coastline. With this, the company has done well to tap into the growing number of travellers who now prefer homestays that offer a local flavour of the destination in terms of cuisine, experiences and location.

Apart from the map, OYO has also published blogs, as part of the campaign to familiarize people with Goa, and lay out detailed description of their properties. The company’s proposition to help travellers stay on their own terms by choosing between a variety of OYO Homes – from a rustic farmhouse to a beach-facing villa – not just serves as the perfect starting point to know Goa a little better but also strikes the perfect chord with millennial travellers. Additionally, to make the most out of this place, OYO has also prepared an itinerary of sorts that lists out things people can do in their properties.

While theoretically the campaign seems well-planned across platforms, covering all the essential touchpoints, social media traction paints a slightly different picture. OYO’s posts have received a lot of ‘likes’ on Facebook, but the comparative engagement on the contests is lower. These numbers are even lower on Twitter and Instagram. The content on posts is too verbose and doesn’t appeal in a way that would pull people to participate. So, while OYO has done its best to put out as much information as possible, the content doesn’t do justice to the idea.

Nevertheless, the map remains the highlight of the campaign and serves well to paint a very helpful picture of India’s favourite holiday destination. What do you think?

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As the travel space expands invariably, Malaysia-based Global Rooms is exploring a partnership with domestic low-cost carrier SpiceJet to sell its niche segment NIDA Rooms. This move came in to cater the tourism that is flocking in from South East Asia to India.  Global Rooms is the parent company of NIDA Rooms. It commenced its operation in September last year and is currently in the final stages of raising a round of USD 3-3.5 million funding to spread its reach in other markets such as Vietnam, China, besides India.

(Image: Image by amalakar/ CC BY 2.0)

Company’s Co-Founder Kaneswaram Avili, also the former chief commercial officer for SpiceJet was one of the several senior SpiceJet executives who parted ways with the Gurgaon-based airline after current promoter Ajay Singh took control of the carrier from Maran’s family early last year.

With Global Rooms partnering with SpiceJet, he adds;

“Flight plus hotel products have a big demand and, therefore, partnering with an airline makes a lot of sense. Spicejet is a strong brand in the category we are participating. We are actively looking at forging a partnership with the airline to promote our niche product,”

Avili had founded the company with former Credit Suisse executive Dennis Melka last year in August. He was a part of no-frills AirAsia and later Tony Fernandes’ Tune Hotels. The business model of Global Rooms aims to help both low cost airlines and budget hotels. The occupancy rate of hotels across South East Asia remains 60% with about 40% lying vacant. The idea is to collate that 40% and bring it into productive use by increasing the occupancy rate.

The company has tied up with 3000 hotels, five rooms in each hotel, pan Asia including Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand. Avili shares his plans to expand the sector in Latin America realising its full potential to tap the market. He said his company had mopped up a seed capital of 1.3 million USD and is in the final stage to raise another 3-3.5 million USD.

This move could be the right step as the low cost carriers try to minimise the role of OTAs and attract more direct bookings. A traveller looking for flights and hotels would prefer OTA than booking the flight with the carrier and hotel with an OTA. Offering more than just flights would reduce the dependence of travellers on other services to book hotels and could possibly have a long term advantage for SpiceJet.

Source: MoneyControl

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The acquisition of ZO Rooms by rival OYO Rooms has been in news for a while. Earlier reports indicated that OYO Rooms was in process to acquire ZO Rooms in an all stock deal and that ZO Rooms has been laying off employees. Earlier today some speculations came out about the acquisition being completed after ZO Rooms website and app stopped working but were dismissed soon after the website went live again. Now there is a confirmation of the same from OYO Rooms investor Softbank.

The acquisition wasn’t surprising considering the fact that both the companies were spending the funds on expanding rapidly and OYO Rooms had a clear advantage. Zostel Hospitality was unable to raise subsequent rounds from other investors or their existing investors which eventually resulted in the acquisition. Softbank’s earning release indicates that OYO Rooms has grown 34 fold from the previous year.

This acquisition will clearly put OYO Rooms on the top in this space with a significant margin. This segment has not only seen new startups trying to aggregate the budget hotel properties but also the entry of major OTAs including MakeMyTrip, Goibibo and Yatra. While the brands haven’t shown any significant revenue yet, it should change over time as they build trust among travellers.

Source: Business Standard

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This has been an exciting year, for the travel industry as well as for us and that means we had plenty of stories to share. Newer brands made as many headlines as the established names and there were many highs and lows.

Looking back at this year, we have created a round-up of our most popular stories to refresh the events just in case you missed them.

#1- Plenty of investments

Many travel startups got a strong start to the year 2015 with heavy investments by both foreign and domestic investors. While the investor activity slowed down near the end of year, there were some newsworthy investments earlier. We compiled an infographic of the funding raised by the popular travel startups in different categories. Read full story.

#2- Twitter lessons from AirAsia India MD & CEO

Mittu Chandilya is the young Indian at the helm of AirAsia in India. While working his plans to make India operations the largest of AirAsia subsidiaries, he also actively engages with the customers on social media to ensure quality of service and customer satisfaction. We spoke with him to learn a thing or two about using social media right for an airline brand. Read full story.

#3- Year of budget stays

Budget hotel startups were the highlight of this year. This segment saw the entry of multiple players trying to revolutionise the way we look at the low cost hotels but at which some of them picked up pace, it was clear that the OTAs won’t be happy. They were gaining the power to leverage volume to their advantage, something that wasn’t seen in the hotel space at this scale until now. Read full story.

#4- OTAs hit back

Like we said, the OTAs didn’t appreciate the idea of letting the budget hotel aggregators feed on them. Before the startups could do serious damage, some major OTAs blocked them cutting one of their major source of bookings. Read full story.

#5- TripAdvisor takes a swing

It is not at all easy for the OTAs. The hoteliers don’t like them even when they drive large share of bookings. Not only the budget hotels but their friend TripAdvisor also entered the same playground. Lower rate of commissions and better visibility were enough incentives for smaller players to skip their name and shake hands with TripAdvisor. Read full story.

#6- Conversation with Winnie Tan, Tripzilla

The Singapore based company started in 2010 and quickly went on to become the favourite of outbound travellers in the region. Along with that they are also a good example to look for on how to use content right to inspire travellers. Recently they also launched a flight metasearch engine which gives the OTAs a pass and offers only direct deals. Read full story.

#7- Stayzilla shifted focus to alternative stays

India based accommodation booking platform Stayzilla took a strong focus on homestays and other alternative stays options this year. With the message of ‘Make room for something new’, they are actively inviting the people to start adopting the fast approaching shared economy trend. Read full story.

#8- Marketing lessons by the industry experts

There is something seriously wrong in following the patterns. There is no one strategy that can fit all brands and the marketers should stop pushing the same buttons. Marketing experts like Taranjeet Singh, Country Business Head, Twitter India and Terrence Voon, Director, Marketing Activation, Singapore Tourism Board shared some strong pointers for promoting a travel brand. Read full story.

#9- British Airways social media blooper

British Airways made lot of news this year, social media campaigns, new Dreamliner place and more. But one social media mistake made the strongest headlines for them. British Airways got strong backlash on social media after they sent a predrafted tweet to cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar and stayed for quite a while in the twitter trends. Read full story.

#10- Technologies for the road

Driverless cars, especially the Google ones were also in the headlines every now and then. If and when they come in, the travel industry will see major transformations. While we were waiting for these autonomous cars to arrive, we also listed down some other technologies that are coming to our cars soon. Read full story.

We have got lot of exciting things lined up for the year 2016 and for a start, we have already announced Startup Knockdown Mumbai and there will be more coming soon.

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Treebo Hotels, a tech-enabled budget hotel brand based in Bangalore, has recently announced the launch of Treebo Alpha, an exclusive offering developed to cater to the needs of corporate travellers. This offering includes multiple benefits like free office pickups and drops, personal 4G dongles, complimentary laundry service and free evening snacks.

Elaborating on this business development, Sidharth Gupta, the co-founder of Treebo Hotels, quoted:

“The demand for Alpha has come directly from our corporate partners. We conducted a survey with our 200 strong institutional client base to understand how their needs differed from the leisure traveller. They have already been using the base Treebo offering with clean rooms, assured essentials and prompt service extensively. But given their hectic work-travel schedules and long periods of staying away from home, they also have some specialized requirements to help them stay efficient and comfortable at the same time. Alpha has been designed keeping these requirements in mind.”

Commenting on the behavior of corporate travellers, he stated:

“What’s interesting is that clients are willing to pay a little extra for these additional benefits. Alpha has therefore been priced at a premium, with rooms starting Rs 1999 per night. This is consistent with Treebo’s approach of offering a high quality experience to all types of travellers rather than only using discounts to target them.”

Currently, Treebo Hotels is operating at around 75% occupancy across hotels every day. With the launch of ‘Treebo Alpha, the brand aims to grow its share in the business travel segment, which comprises 40% of the budget travel and hospitality segment.

Another player in this space, ZO Rooms launched Zo Prime – a premium offering apart from the budget offering. Alpha by Treebo Hotels will go against the likes of ZO Prime and OYO Premium. The ZO Rooms properties listed under Prime offer features like airport transfers and foreign exchange over other ZO properties.

The Indian travel market has witnessed a growing demand of hotel budget aggregators over the past few months. They are challenging the conventional budget and mid-market chain’s businesses and have already started to create waves in the hotel industry.

Founded in March this year by IIT alumni Sidharth Gupta, Rahul Chaudhary and Kadam Jeet Jain, Treebo was formerly known as ‘Zipotel’. It has a network of 45 hotels across 9 cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, New Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai.

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Yatra, the leading online provider of travel services in India, has recently introduced TG Rooms and TG Stays. TG Rooms is their range of budget hotels while TG Stays includes verified homestays.

With 500 accommodations in 60 cities, TG Rooms and TG Stays will offer basic amenities to its budget travellers. TG Rooms will have free Wi-Fi and Air Conditioners while TG Stays will provide reliable and verified and comfortable homestays in prominent holiday destinations of the country. The starting price of such accommodations is INR 499.

According to the report, Sharat Dhall, the President of Yatra, quoted:

“Growing our hotel business is a key focus for us, and the launch of TG Rooms and TG Stays is another step in the same direction. With TG Rooms and TG Stays, we are looking to expand our inventory even further and offer travellers a diversified portfolio of budget accommodation options. TG Stays is targeting a new segment in the market by aggregating verified home stays, which are especially ideal for short vacations, weekend getaways and road trips that are gaining immense popularity amongst Indians…”

Dazzled by the kind of progress OYO Rooms is making in India, many small and big players have entered the budget hotel segment recently. After taking note of the opportunities in this space, almost everyone is trying to take a bite out of the pie. However there is more to it for the OTAs like Yatra or GoIbibo.

With brands like OYO Rooms and ZO Rooms expanding quickly, this was definitely expected from the OTAs (Read: Will budget hotel startups eat the OTA pie?). The comissions from hotel bookings drive large volume of business for the OTAs. With the kind of size these budget hotel startups are growing to, OTAs were under threat of being pushed out of the equation. With the entry in this segment, they will try to build up on their name and widespread network before the dust settles. GoIbibo recently introduced GoStays and there have been reports of MakeMyTrip working on something along the same lines. With the kind of reach Yatra has among hoteliers, reaching different geographies shouldn’t be Yatra’s biggest problem. The problem would be posed by budget hotel chains like OYO Rooms and ZO Rooms which have already grown big and are expanding aggressively.

Homestays are also starting to catch up and we will see them as a major trend in few years (Read: 5 upcoming travel trends in India). In India, Stayzilla is making most headlines in this space while Airbnb has been a party killer for hotels in many other countries. Over the years Yatra has built strong trust among Indian travellers and that can help drive people towards homestays with TG Stays. TG Stays has got huge potential as Airbnb isn’t a big name in India yet.

While they have made a move in homestays in time, we can’t say the same for TG Rooms. They will face stiff competition here and many others have a lead with the head start. Plus there will be more competition with other OTAs entering the picture and the price war might get even more aggressive.

What do you think will change with the entry of OTAs in this space? Do you think they can be a threat to brands like OYO Rooms and ZO Rooms?

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Soon after the budget hotel aggregator OYO Rooms made news with the partnership with Lookup, we have an update of another interesting alliance. VenuePick, a platform that helps people find venues for weddings, birthdays, corporate events and other occasions, has announced partnership with OYO Rooms.

This is quite an interesting partnership and could be very significant for both the brands. Whether it is a corporate event or marriage, there are a large number of outstation guests and hosts have to arrange for their lodging. After this partnership, VenuePick will continue to serve its usual market but will also help the clients locate budget friendly OYO Rooms in Delhi NCR. The room booking will take place on OYO Rooms platform only. The clients will be able to place room requirements at VenuePick and will be directed to OYO Rooms for the booking.

It is not just VenuePick’s clients who stand to gain out of this partnership. OYO Rooms caters to many corporate clients and now they can help them find conference centres and other venues by utilising VenuePick.

According to Sandeep Kaistha, Founder and CEO of Venuepick, “The partnership between OYO Rooms and Venuepick is a step in the right direction as it greatly benefits our clients. Most weddings or major corporate events have outstation guests and what’s better than getting our clients, banquets as well as rooms for those guests with relative ease.”

TravHQ Take

OYO Rooms has not only been actively expanding across geographies but also bringing in many firsts in the hotel industry. The partnership with Lookup was an impressive idea and we must admit, it wasn’t something we saw coming. This partnership with VenuePick is another great move by the budget hotel aggregator, something that can be beneficial for both the brands. What do you think of this move by VenuePick and OYO Rooms?

Website: VenuePick OYO Rooms

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Deepak Ravindran’s Lookup was in the news earlier this year, when they became the first Indian startup to raise Series A of $3Million from Twitter’s Co-Founder Biz Stone. Lookup is essentially a mobile chat app which connects businesses with consumers and lets you get things done with a message.

Yesterday, Lookup announced its collaboration with OYO rooms to provide support to their 2200+ hotel properties across 110+ cities. With this association, you can now book budget hotel rooms via a message.

(Read: Will budget hotel startups eat the OTA pie?)

The way it works is quite simple, you need to download the Lookup mobile app on your smartphone. The app uses GPS to detect your location and shows you the list of nearby businesses. If there is an OYO Rooms property near you, it will be displayed under the listing as it did in our case. Alternatively, you could search for an OYO property via the search function. Once you select any hotel, a new chat window appears and you can directly ask any questions about the hotel which includes everything from breakfast availability to room rates.

This could probably be a game-changing move for India where apps like Whatsapp have been growing at an astounding pace and many people are still far more comfortable talking over chat as responses are instant and data is cheaper over voice. It also does provide a convenience option for most of us as it is your human powered mobile assistant so you could book your hotel in the middle of a meeting or find out things which are not provided on their website.

We took this feature for a spin by posting a dummy enquiry. The response was a little slow for our satisfaction. It is understandable as in the backend, queries are handled by a support team which actually gets responses from the concerned business over the phone. It would be also interesting to see how do they factor in discounts & coupon-codes for a price sensitive consumer. If the speed of responses can be handled by Lookup in real time, this could change the way we book our hotels.

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