In order to boost the tourism industry in the state, the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC) has entered into collaboration with vacation rental company Airbnb, to help micro-entrepreneurs in hospitality sector grow their business through four key pillars of support- training, enabling, access and promotion.

This is the first such initiative in the country, and this Tourism Entrepreneurship Accelerator Programme will boost tourism prospects in Sindhudurg, Ratnagiri and Palghar districts. Airbnb will create a training programme for MTDC to identify quality destinations, homes and entrepreneurs. It will train the selected entrepreneurs in technology, hospitality, financing, regulations and promotion. These could either be home owners or people willing to help homeowners rent out their rooms through Airbnb.

The MTDC and Airbnb will first start with selecting homestays in Elephanta Village. Image source: Culture Trip

Airbnb and MTDC have decided to connect selected entrepreneurs with local partners to offer them access to technology, address language barriers and provide mentorship support. Once entrepreneurs are ready to host travellers, Airbnb will partner with content creators to promote homes to tourists around the world. MTDC will also use its promotional platforms to support the entrepreneurs.

Commenting on the association, Jaykumar Rawal, Minister of Tourism Government of Maharashtra, said, “Tourism is not only a source of revenue for the state, but is also key source of growth for local communities. In Airbnb, we have found a global partner whose vision to create skilled micro-entrepreneurs in hospitality and home stay ecosystem to further expand Maharashtra’s tourism potential. This is the first-of-its-kind tourism initiative in India where the Government has used the revenue shared by a partner to create a program to benefit various underprivileged communities in the State. With new innovative initiatives like this one, together with Airbnb, we aim to attract a larger global audience and exponentially boost tourism in Maharashtra.”

Chris Lehane, Global Head of Policy and Communications, Airbnb, said, “Airbnb is committed to create 50,000 hospitality micro-entrepreneurs in India and the Accelerator Programme is a major step towards realising this. In the first year, we expanded to 500 hosts across the state. Now we are planning to expand this programme in a phased manner with focus on particular regions and ultimate across the state.”

Homestays have been generating immense interest lately, with a lot of organizations trying to bring together the unorganised and fragmented segment and increasing focus on this space, by helping them get more publicity and exposure on social media platforms.

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We can learn something from every new person we meet. This holds even more relevance when we talk about people from different cultural backgrounds carrying experiences different than ours. Probably that is why it is said that travel makes you richer.

While travel enriches you, the costs of hotels and flights can add up quickly and dent your finances. Stay On Skill tries to find a way to let you travel more while minimising the hit on your credit card. It provides a platform for homeowners to offer a place to travellers with expertise on skills they are interested in learning. Free piano lessons? That extra bed will get you that. The travellers get a free homestay and save on hotel / Airbnb costs in return.

The idea for Stay On Skills popped up after Arjun Tuli, a serial entrepreneur, was trying to cook travel plans with little money in hand after he ended up investing his savings in his previous startup. After narrowing down to an idea that felt right, he joined hands with Rajshree Bothra, previously GM-Marketing at Whirlpool India and Principal growth at Zivame, to build the product.

Learning from his previous experiences, Arjun first wanted to test and validate the idea with a pool of fitting users, before directing resources towards building a complicated tech solution. With help from Abhishek Garg, core team member at Morpheus Gang, Arjun and Rajshree sketched plans to validate the idea and to begin, they came up with campaign titled ‘Skill India Campaign’ to get feedback and identify challenges.

With the campaign, they are inviting ‘learners’ to host selected skilled people from around the world to gain new skills. Of course there is the other side of this campaign as well, called ‘India Tour 2017’ which invites experts to teach their skills while they travel. Arjun shares that the campaign has attracted a good number of travellers with around 48 percent of the entries coming from solo female travellers carrying experience of designing, digital marketing, blogging and more. This is certainly a positive sign considering that most P2P travel platforms (including Couchsurfing) had a gender imbalance in the early days.

Arjun is also quick to point out that while it might appear that the ‘experts’ are just people looking to travel for cheap, that is not exactly the case. Instead, in most cases, they are experienced people from different domains looking for a way to give back to the society and to connect with people in smaller cities. Among the registrations, they have also received entries from professional musicians, famous theatre artists and VCs.

While the idea is certainly very intriguing, it faces the key challenges associated with any P2P business. Building communities on both ends is a tall order and will create roadblocks in marketing as they will have to pick sides in their communication. Accepting the same, Arjun says that instead of a user base, it is like building a huge family sharing the same vision and is indeed the hardest part. To top that up, India is certainly a tough market with high expectations and low trust.

On the flipside, with a stronger focus on ‘skills’ as currency and more data on travellers, Stay On Skills can win where Couchsurfing went haywire. Couchsurfing started in the true spirit of travelling with a powerful community but with no clear barriers, it diluted and started to repel even the loyalists. This is where Stay On Skill can shine. They have designed their sign up process to virtually incentivise users for providing more details, connecting LinkedIn and signing up as learner (host) as well. Arjun comments that the travellers signing up on the platform should bring something to the table and will have to bring validations for the skills they claim to have. For the growth of the platform, it is very important that value is delivered to the learners.

They plan to do a public launch after the campaigns conclude. The registrations for the campaign are open till May 25, 217. You can register as a learner to host experts on topics you are interested in or register as an expert and teach someone a new skill while exploring new places. You can direct your feedback and queries to Arjun Tuli.

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Tujia hosted the 2017 Tujia Open World Summit in Beijing on March 23 and Co-founder and CEO Justin Luo took the stage to highlight the development strategy for 2017. He further explained the specific strategic actions from four perspectives, namely, consumers, hosts, property buyers as well as regionalisation. Yang Changle, Chief Operation Officer of Tujia Platform Operation Company and Ding Xiaoliang, President of Tujia Offline Operation Company, in their first public appearance, delivered the 2017 product launches one after another, and illustrated the specific planning of several businesses and key products both online and offline in more detail.

The key theme of the conference was increasing focus on user experience. Going forward, Tujia will target user profile more precisely, with features like “multiple people, extended period of stay and personalized lodging experience”, to meet the demands for more scenarios such as business travel, family gatherings, and transitional accommodation.

In order to make progress in this direction, first step will be to offer the homestays through eight platforms so that travellers can book easily and adhere to their preferable platform. Next will be to focus on more aspects of the entire trip, before, during and after the stay to address the specific needs. Most importantly, Tujia is upgrading user service guarantee by bringing together elements like house examination, Tujia premium hosts, two way evaluation among others to boost confidence.

Distributing the inventory through eight platforms including Tujia.com, Mayi.com, Ctrip.com, Elong.com, Qunar.com and 58.com, WeChat hotel booking and Zhima Credit would also have advantages for hosts. Justin Luo announced that Tujia has consolidated all of them and hosts can use the Tujia’s host side management app to control all the channels.

To get more people to share their homes, Tujia has piloted a program in 10 cities to provide room cleaning, towel and bed sheet laundry as well as smart lock service. In addition to this, Tujia will also provide other services like operational training, security consulting, income management and other service support to help the hosts become more professional.

Tujia has also been working with property developers to further ramp up supply side of the business and is looking to have deeper associations with regional governments and partners.

As Airbnb looks to strengthen its position in China as it recently announced with the new brand launch, Tujia is scaling up the challenge. With reach to an array of distribution channels and other offerings for the hosts, Tujia is trying to take control of one side of the chain and have stronger inventory which in turn will attract more guests. How the two major players compete on the Chinese soil is something time will tell.

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In a rather surprising announcement, Stayzilla has announced that the company will reboot its operations. They have halted operations of Stayzilla as they are now and are looking to start again with a different model.

Stayzilla was fighting for a space in the highly competitive accommodation segment. Unlike most alternative accommodation platforms, they did quite extensive groundwork to help people make their homes ready to host travellers and were validating the listings to boost travellers’ confidence. This however had its costs and the challenges were far too many. Apart from spending resources on creating the inventory, they also had to work to gain confidence of travellers into booking a homestay. The ongoing price wars in the hotel space didn’t help the cause either.

Yogendra Vasupal, CEO, Stayzilla

Stayzilla CEO Yogendra Vasupal shared a detailed note on the company blog thanking the people and teams who helped build what they did. He also highlighted the challenges they identified which drove them towards taking this decision. Below is an excerpt from the same:

Reason for Failure

Despite having a very clear lead, despite a lot of firsts, despite being successful in getting an ecosystem up from scratch pan-India, there are a few reasons why we are at this juncture.

The travel marketplace does not have local network effects and, therefore, we can’t really take a focused city-by-city approach in terms of matching supply and demand. The demand and supply for homestays was non-existent 18 months back, excluding a few small pockets. As a result, we had to invest extensively in both sides of the marketplace, creating homestays as well as guests who would choose a homestay across the country. We were actually successful at this — we have created 8000 homestays in over 900 towns — but this stretched us thin.

Some of India’s key macro trends further deteriorated our ability to expand quickly and cost effectively. India does not have a lot of public goods, often taken for granted in mature markets like logistics, tech savvy suppliers and online user demand. A homestays marketplace needs to invest in educating the market on the concept and even using Internet (!) and not just the product. The costs, both financial and opportunity costs, creep up on you over a period of time and gets rationalized as cost of doing business in India.

This was further exacerbated by the discounting based growth rampant in the travel industry since 2015. Forced to match prices, we could not even recoup what we put in, necessitating very large capital requirement simply to sustain growth.

A change in what and how I value business also played a large part, I feel. More on that later.

You can read his complete post here in which not he talks about the hurdles they faced but also puts light on his journey so far as an entrepreneur.

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Alternative accommodation marketplace Airbnb has started to move swiftly in the Indian market and is now looking to offer more authentic Indian experiences on the platform. As the travellers are now exploring beyond the obvious tourist attractions, Airbnb is trying to offer accommodation in the new regions that are attracting these travellers and in order to boost the number of options available to them, the rental platform has signed a MoU with Self-Employed Women’s Association of India (SEWA).

With this association, Airbnb will work with the members of SEWA to help them share their homes and host domestic and international guests. This will not only help them get more quality listings on the platform but will also create economic opportunities for the women in rural India and boost tourism in the region.

The initiative has been piloted in Gujarat and will soon move to other states as well. Together they will also explore partnership opportunities with various state governments, academic institutions, media and other civil society organisations.

“By partnering with SEWA members to offer homestays on Airbnb, we hope to offer an authentic experience of rural India for travellers while ensuring that the benefits of tourism flow back to the rural community,” said Amanpreet Bajaj, Airbnb India country manager.

Airbnb will offer training to SEWA members on home sharing and responsible hosting practices. Currently Airbnb claims to have around 18,000 listings in India with half of the hosts being female. This association should translate into better experience for the guests while also inspiring more confidence to book.

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Chhattisgarh Tourism Board has been actively promoting tourism in the region and educating more travellers about Chhattisgarh as a destination. To achieve the same, they have been taking up initiatives, introducing campaigns and forging meaningful ties. In yet another step in the same direction, alternative accommodation platform Stayzilla and Chhattisgarh Tourism Board have associated to unlock the potential of homestays in the region. Stayzilla has previously partnered with other state tourism boards with similar objective and is working with them to develop an ecosystem for alternative accommodation.

The MoU was signed and exchanged in the presence of Hon’ble Chief Minister of Chhattisgarh, Dr. Raman Singh, Mr. M.T. Nandi – IFS – Managing Director – Chhattisgarh Tourism Board, Mr. Shreerang Pathak  – Deputy General Manager – Chhattisgarh Tourism Board, Mr Dilip Acharya – Head Operations Section – Chhattisgarh Tourism Board and Mr. Ankit Rastogi, VP Marketplace, Stayzilla.com. Under this agreement, Stayzilla will support verification procedures, jointly boost homestays in cities & places of interest within Chhattisgarh. All homestays registered within the state will receive technical support in the form of inventory management and software applications to ensure seamless booking procedures. Stayzilla already has education and training processes in place to get more hosts on the platform and with this association, the tourism board and Stayzilla will jointly conduct the training sessions on best practices.

Chhattisgarh is a relatively less explored geography and is known for its abundant forest cover. As the government pushes for driving tourism in the region, providing affordable homestays will help meet the demand that will build over time.

Commenting on the occasion, Ankit Rastogi, VP Marketplace said, “Chhattisgarh is comparatively unexplored in comparison to the rest of the country and has the potential to offer great destinations for our travelers. Most of these sites are untouched and offer a one of its kind unique and alternate experience to tourists, compared to traditional destinations which have become overcrowded. We are very happy to associate with Chhattisgarh Tourism Board (CTB) for unlocking more homestays and creating an awareness on the need for local and authentic homestays.”

Indian travellers have started to embrace the idea of homestays and Stayzilla is doing the legwork to build a strong supply to cater to these travellers. There is still a long way to go but individually verifying the homestays and hosts has helped the platform boost trust and get more travellers in India to ditch hotel for a change.

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Stayzilla has signed an MoU with Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Limited to jointly promote and market homestays and alternative stays in the state of Gujarat. The MoU was signed and exchanged by Mr. S.J.Haider (IAS), Principal Secretary (Tourism) of Gujarat Tourism in the presence of Hon. Union Minister of State for Tourism and Culture, Dr. Mahesh Sharma and Hon. Tourism Secretary, Mr. Vinod Zutshi, Ministry of Tourism, Government of India.

Stayzilla has been bullish on growing the market for alternate accommodation in India and has been doing heavy legwork in regions where there is potential market. The brand has been individually verifying the listings before showcasing them on the website. This has helped the travellers gain trust in the hosts which in turn has allowed the brand to boost bookings and thus the value offered to the hosts contributing to the overall growth of the segment.

Stayzilla has previously signed similar MoUs with Madhya Pradesh State Tourism Development Corporation and Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board and as the state governments look at supporting the local communities by giving a boost to tourism, it is likely that Stayzilla will be forging more such partnerships in future.

Under the new partnership, Gujarat Tourism and Stayzilla will cross promote the alternate stays on each other’s digital platforms. Stayzilla will also help in improving the homestays in the state and verify them to drive more travellers. The brand already conducts various workshops to educate people who run homestays and will conduct joint sessions with TCGL to encourage homestays and support them with technology.

Commenting on this announcement, Ankit Rastogi, Vice President, Marketplace, Stayzilla said, “We, at Stayzilla, have maintained that the key to increasing tourism is the availability of quality and affordable rooms, pan India. The shortage of rooms cannot be solved efficiently by constructing hotels within a short frame of time. We are excited about the fact that various State Governments in conjunction with the Central Government have come together in realizing this. Gujarat has emerged as one of the most popular states in the country for travel, thus playing a significant role in India’s tourism potential. This MoU, like the others, will help in building a vibrant ecosystem for Homestays in Gujarat.”

The brand has hosted around 600 workshops across the country of which around 80 have been in Gujarat. This association and their various other partnerships will go a long way towards addressing the accommodation challenge in Indian market. OYO Rooms has also started pushing into the alternative stays recently and could pose competition to Stayzilla in future. We earlier had a chat with Yogendra Vasupal, the man at the helm of Stayzilla to talk more about the same. You can find the interview here.

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Gurgaon based vacation rental startup Guesthouser is looking to raise a Series A round of funding soon. They are looking for funds worth USD 5-7 million to expand the team, add new technology and promote the brand. The company started over a year ago and received its initial seed funding of USD 5 million by Milestone Ventures.

Guesthouser offers alternative stays on its platform and the offerings range from treehouses to villas. According to the report by The Hindu Business Line, Homestays account for over 55 percent of the listings on the platform. They plan to increase their focus on the North East as they go forward. According to the Founder & CEO, Dhruv Dutt Sharma, the region hasn’t got infrastructure for large hotels which adds to the potential of alternative stays in the region.

Many players have recently started making move in this space. Stayzilla announced that they will be increasing their focus in this space and also introduced a new app so that users can easily search. Yatra.com also made a move in this space and introduced their brand TG Stays to take a bite out of the pie when it is baked. Of course Airbnb is there but isn’t a very strong player in India yet. But according to Julian Persaud, Regional Director, APAC, Airbnb, the brand has a strong focus on India and the competition is good as it prepares the market. With the next round of funding, Guesthouser will be marketing aggressively to stay competitive in this growing segment.

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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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Low cost accommodation is a segment of the travel industry which was largely unexplored until budget hotel chains entered the equation. Finding a quality low cost stay is a major issue for travellers and most players are trying to address this by standardising the budget hotels. Among these ever increasing budget hotel chains, Stayzilla is trying to solve the problem in a different way.

Yesterday at the Stayzllla App launch event in Bangalore, Stayzilla, the budget hotel aggregator announced its foray into the highly fragmented market of alternative stays. While the word has been out for a while now, they have taken a step ahead with a brand new mobile app for hosts and guests. Going forward, they expect this segment to generate about half of their revenues.

“India is facing shortage of rooms for travellers and this is another reason why we want to sell more alternative stay options for travellers. Today, India’s stay market is large and fragmented with shortage of close to 1million rooms in the country, creating a huge opportunity for expansion and growth,” said Yogendra Vasupal, Founder and CEO, Stayzilla.

They have taken a cue from Airbnb here but with that, they are also trying to build an entire community around the alternative stays. Its app allows hosts to select guests on the basis of various parameters like professional connections, education and common interests. Stayzilla has been operational for a while now and at this point only 20 percent of their business comes from alternative stays which they will try to push up to 50 in few years’ time.

Good morning tweeps! Something AWESOME is happening at #Stayzilla TODAY. Can you guess what it is?

— Stayzilla.com (@stayzilla) September 9, 2015

Stayzilla actively engaged with its twitter audience during the launch event of the app. Live tweets were made with the hashtag #MakeRoomForSomethingNew and #StayzillaBrandLaunch to keep the followers updated in realtime. We tried out the app and it left good initial impressions. It has a simple interface that would allow you to pick dates, add filters and find your stay. There were some performance issues but that is a given considering it has just been launched. They are actively working on it and even before we went on to write this, there was another update available with bug fixes.

With a new tagline ‘Make room for something new’, alternative stays aren’t the only new thing on Stayzilla. They won’t move away from the budget hotel segment completely. While it was rumoured that Stayzilla will come up with own budget hotel brand, they have also opened up the platform for other budget hotel chains including OYO Rooms, Zo Rooms, Treebo and Ginger. With this move, they are trying to be the one stop for anyone looking for budget stays.

Trying to connect music lovers?

Airbnb isn’t the only player in alternative stays that they are up against. Guesthouser also offers vacation rentals and holiday homes on its website. However homestays is where Stayzilla might just have the edge over Guesthouser.

Sharing economy is bound to grow in coming years as more people set off to travel looking for authentic local experiences. During ‘The Singapore Dialogue’ concluded recently, Deep Kalra, CEO, Makemytrip & Bart Bellers, Senior Advisor- Corporate Strategy, Amadeus Asia Pacific suggested that we will be surprised by the growth of this segment when it picks up momentum (Read: The Singapore Dialogue: 5 upcoming travel trends in Asia). So Stayzilla is definitely heading in the right direction and will have the early mover advantage when others try to enter the space.

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