OYO Hotels plans to invest € 40 million in the United Kingdom to expand its presence in 10 cities in the county during the next 18 months, marking its first foray beyond Asian markets.

It will start operations with four properties in London that offer more than 80 rooms and by 2020, OYO plans to hire 100 people in cities across the UK and host guests in over 5,000 rooms. The cities include Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.

“The UK has been the topmost international travel destination for several years and last year hosted over 19 million tourists from around the world,” said Ritesh Agarwal, founder CEO of OYO.

“Driven by its booming domestic and international travel and budget hospitality needs, the UK presents a multi-billion dollar opportunity for OYO,” he said.

The UK business will be led by British entrepreneur Jeremy Sanders, who co-founded the British restaurant chain, Coco di Mama. “Over the next year, they will aim to build out the team by hiring an additional 100,” people across the country, he said.

OYO will offer guests the OYO Townhouse experience — suited for the needs of millennial travellers, aspiring for high-quality accommodations.

OYO is backed by leading investors, including the SoftBank Group, Greenoak Capital, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India, Hero Enterprise and China Lodging Group.

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Try finding quality accommodation on a low budget and chances are you will be lost in the maze of results which a search engine like Google will throw up. The highly fragmented budget hotel segment is at war and you have all kind of players vying in for the attention of the customer.

You know what you are booking in case of a flights, trains or high end luxury hotels but with the highly fragmented budget hotel industry, you really don’t know what to expect. The problem isn’t lack of options but an overly crowded segment. The reviews you find on OTAs and metasearch websites like TripAdvisor help to some extent but only in case of destinations that are frequented by travellers. In case of Tier2 and Tier3 cities, the problem magnifies to another level. Hotel chains that invest in their own properties stay away from these cities because of the low ROI and it is hard to find reviews for the hotels that are already present there.

Vista Rooms is a budget hotel aggregator offering rebranded and standardised hotel rooms

Earlier this year during SATTE Mumbai West, we met a new hotel chain aggregator called Vista Rooms. Similar to other hotel chains that have come up recently, they partner with individual hotel properties, standardise them and offer them tools & support to provide high quality accommodation at low prices. However the biggest differentiator lies in their approach. While most other chains are investing heavily in metro cities, they are focusing primarily on Tier2 and Tier3 cities where there are hardly any quality budget hotels.

We got a chance to have a conversation with Ankita Sheth, one of the co-founders of Vista Rooms and she shared Vista Rooms’ vision with us.

You can book a stay for your next vacation with Vista Rooms here. You can follow them on Facebook and Twitter for more updates and attractive offers.

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