This morning, I woke up to my colleague sending me a news article about the arrest of Stayzilla co-founder Yogendra Vasupal. It stated that he has been arrested on charges of defrauding an ad agency and he has reportedly confessed to the charges. However, the news article shared only a small, slightly skewed, piece of what is going on. Something that Yogendra put in detail in a blog post titled “Help! I need everybody” along with proofs to support his statements. The blog post was written by him in advance anticipating such a scenario and it was published by Rupal Yogendra at 2:22 am on March 15/2017.

You can find the full blog post here.

The ad agency in question here dismisses the claim that the payment was held due to deficiency of service. According to them, this was never communicated to them and that Stayzilla acknowledged the invoices earlier. While it won’t be right to pass verdicts here as it is for the courts to determine, it is quite apparent from his blog post and the supporting videos and audios that there is a clear situation of threat to them. The entire situation very well highlights the hollow foundation under the heavy promises of a startup ecosystem. The government has been blowing trumpets about its Startup India initiative but what good will come out if it can’t promise equality and fair law. Law enforcement agencies who don’t understand law! Dismissing real threats despite reports! Political influence dominating visible proofs!

The country can’t claim to support the startups if the root of all problems, corruption, isn’t addressed. If 70 percent of the population has first hand experience of bribery, something isn’t right. If someone with political influence has power to bend laws, there is something wrong here too. This isn’t just about what a company is facing right now. It is about the road we are paving for hundreds of other companies.

I urge the readers to help an entrepreneur by getting the attention of people who can do right in this situation. Maybe he is right, maybe he is not. But the way this situation is being dealt with clearly isn’t right. Please tweet this to PMO India, PriyankKharge and anyone else who you think can set things right.

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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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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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OYO Rooms, the budget hotel aggregator, has forged partnership with Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board (UTDB) in order to develop a network of better stay options for visitors coming to the region. The brand has signed MoU with the state to develop hospitality ecosystem in the state according to a statement by OYO Rooms.

According to OYO Rooms, the company currently runs 15 homestays in the region and they are registered with the state government. They are looking at a number of 50 homestays by the end of this year. Similar to hotel properties, OYO is standardising the homestays and equipping them with standard OYO amenities the hotel aggregator claims to offer at the hotel properties.

OYO says that the brand is already working with other state governments as well, including Maharashtra and Telangana to develop a tourism ecosystem.

Commenting on the development, Shailesh Bagauli, CEO, Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board said, “We are confident that OYO’s expertise in standardising and marketing large inventories to customers in different parts of India will drive immense value to this partnership. We look forward to our joint efforts contributing to increased tourist influx and a better stay experience for visitors to Uttarakhand.”

After budget hotels, homestays are gaining lot of interest from startups and major travel brands alike. Airbnb is stirring things up on a global scale while in India, Stayzilla seems to be leading the trend of homestays. Major OTA Yatra.com introduced TG Stays under which they are offering alternative accommodation options. MakeMyTrip also expressed interest in the segment. Oravel Stays, the company that operates the brand OYO Rooms first started in the alternative accommodation segment but later went ahead in the budget hotel space. However, alternative stay isn’t a segment to be missed and that is why the brand is coming back to it. Indian market offers its unique share of challenges for these players as shared by Stayzilla founder Yogendra Vasupal. There is lot more groundwork required for the platform before people would start trusting and booking. It will be interesting how this segment pans out with the multiple players showing signs of movement.

Source: Business Standard

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Sharing economy is not going anywhere. It has seen success in the west and is now picking up in the APAC. Indian market is open to new experiments and thanks to the millennials, it has seen a huge variation in the way the consumers are looking at products. They are out there and they want to try new things.

Homestays are picking up a trend in India. Stayzilla was founded with the same vision and offers a wide variety of stay options like guesthouses, lodges, and homestays going past just hotels. Stayzilla also aims to provide unprecedented reach to travellers by providing stays across the entire length and breadth of the country, including all sorts of options from ultra-low-budget rooms to luxury stays. Currently, Stayzilla has more than 30000 options spread across more than 4500 towns.

During the recently concluded Phocuswright India, we got a chance to speak with Yogendra Vasupal, CEO, Stayzilla about the opportunities and challenges for alternate stays in India. Here’s an edited excerpt from the conversation:

What is the current state of alternative stay segment in India?

It’s very early. In the last six months we have started opening up the supply and we have got real homestays and not just guest houses or lodges in over 100 towns across India. We are looking to take it up to 500 by the end of this year. The demand has started to move up in alternate stays, at least on our platform in the last 4-5 months. The segment used to contribute around 6-7% of our business 6 months back and is currently contributing 40%.

How is your approach different from Airbnb?

Airbnb model has seen great success all over and that is something we learned from but when it comes to India, you need to be able to get the message across to people in small cities and towns. It isn’t something that you can market easily. We are working to sort the supply side by hosting town-hall meetings in various cities. These meetings are an assemblage of people who have an extra room and we pitch them our model. We are currently doing eight town halls a week in eight different cities to open up supply. That is one difference on supply side.

The second difference on the demand side. Reviews and ratings are important but initially the engine is not gonna run because you are not gonna start with reviews or ratings. You require sufficient volume for it to have some validity. So we are also verifying the homes and hosts. If you list your home on Stayzilla, it won’t go live right away. Somebody from our team will visit you and will have a 50 point checklist.

The product experience is also very different on Stayzilla as compared to Airbnb. As a host, you get control over what kind of guests are coming to your place. You can open up your home for travellers with family or maybe just for travellers with pets. Along with this, we are also trying to add a social angle to these homestays. You can host members of certain communities, whether it is for fans of your favourite band or alumni of your college. This results in more bookings being accepted by hosts and also enhance the experience of both guests and host.

What are the prime challenges you face in operating a peer-to-peer platform?

The prime challenge is the ability to convey trust and safety initially. It is important to build trust and over the last two weeks during small tests, we have observed that putting the verified badges have driven conversions up by 80 percent for those properties. Having the initial batch of both hosts and guests being exceptional is very important because one bad incident can ruin this large market going forward. We are being careful and not hurrying to build it up, especially the community part. We want people who believe in hosting for the community than just random people listing their homes. We are the perfect balance between Couchsurfing and Airbnb.

Who are you trying to attract first to the platform? The suppliers or the guests?

We already have hotels, lodges and guesthouses in over 4000 towns and they are in good demand. The demand is already there so it is important to attract suppliers and that is exactly what we have been doing for the past six months. Our whole campaign “Make room for something new” that we introduced last year was targeted towards getting more hosts on the platform.

What can we expect from Stayzilla in near future?

We are looking at alternate stays accounting for 60-70% of our business in next 3-4 months. We are targeting 10,000 room-nights in homestays by December. You should expect to have great experiences and not just accommodation. We have got hosts with different skill sets, right from cooking to golfing. We want to explore how we can curate experiences along with homestays.

You can browse through the homestays available on Stayzilla here. You can find other stories from Phocuswright India here.

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Women are an essential element of society. They play a significant role in the upliftment of the human community and civilisation. Acknowledging their efforts in political and social fields over the years, International Women’s Day was first celebrated as a Socialist political event in 1909.

Celebrating the beauty and elegance of womanhood, International Women’s Day 2016 was celebrated in an awe-inspiring manner. Many travel brands launched woman-centric campaigns and activities that successfully grabbed the attention of the people not only nation-wide but world-wide. We have listed few of them below:

1) Probably, the world’s longest all-women flight ever!

To do a landmark historic event, Air India commendably ran a 17-hour flight that covered more than 8,000 miles.  According to the airline, this was world’s longest all-women operated and supported flight ever! It indicated the fact that every male dominated function can be carried out by women safely and efficiently.

2) #WomenWhoMakeUsFly

Vistara, an Indian airline based in Gurgaon, launched a social media campaign #WomenWhoMakeUsFly to showcase the extraordinary role their women employees play to make the airline fly. These employees have helped the brand scale new heights in reliability and service excellence within a very short time period. As a tribute, Vistara display picture on its Facebook page depicted many female employees. To commemorate further, it even operated all-women crew flights on the domestic network.

3) #GetawayGoddess

Cox and Kings’, a travel company headquartered in the UK, started #GetawayGoddess campaign on Twitter asking females about various reasons that stop them from exploring the world. Interestingly, it reached 30 lakh people generating over three crore impressions in just four hours. There were many destinations listed which displayed women-only tours. Cox and Kings’ also focused on the safety and comfort of the female travellers.

4) Jet Viva – Celebrating Womanhood

As a part of International Women’s Day 2016, Jet Airways has supported four non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working on a range of women issues. It is carrying out its unique in-flight fundraising drive between 7^th March-21^st March on all domestic flights. Beyond this, Jet Airways flights 9W301/9W302 between Mumbai and Delhi and 9W361/9W362 between Delhi and Mumbai will be serviced by all-women cockpit and cabin crew. It also gave special discounts to women travellers.

5) #TravelWithHer

Stayzilla, an online platform that provides convenient and personalised stay experiences with a coverage of 30,000+ properties in 4000+ locations, initiated a travel campaign named ‘#TravelWithHer’. Females were asked to write travel stories about women who inspire them and how proud they feel being a woman. Stayzilla announced that the most popular stories will feature on its website.

Do let us know which one’s your favourite amongst the campaigns above.

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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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Building a successful business isn’t easy. The road from having the idea to actually taking the plunge is tough and the journey beyond that is even tougher. Despite that, we learn about a large number of startups everyday, especially in the fast growing travel space. There are many entrepreneurs who choose to address the pain point of masses. While there are many unsuccessful entrepreneurs, there are some who set examples for others. They make mistakes, they learn from them, they improvise and they keep going.

We reached out to some of the travel industry entrepreneurs, who made news this year, to share the lessons from their journey so far. Here are some of them:

Ritesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO, OYO Rooms

If there is one startup that stirred up the travel industry ecosystem this year, it has to be OYO Rooms. Ritesh Agarwal started his entrepreneurial journey at a very young age and went on to become the first Indian to win Thiel Fellowship. He started OYO Rooms to address the lack of quality hotel accommodation in India by offering predictable and affordable options. They have a network of hotels across 160 cities in India where they are offering great value to the travellers and the tourism ecosystem. This year, the budget hotel aggregator raised over USD 125 million funding and expanded fast enough to threaten some of the biggest names in the industry.

He shared, “In 2015, we learnt from experience that if you can showcase demonstrable benefits to business-owners, and utilize technology to manage everyday business problems, even a legacy industry such as Hotels can be modernized. In over 4000 hotels across India, hotel-owners use our business apps to manage inventory, revenue and CRM.

Lastly, it is critical to build a great team and stay agile. Our hyper-growth coupled with strong unit-economics would not have been possible were it not for diligent operations focus executed by high-quality talent.”

Yogendra Vauspal, Founder, Stayzilla

Yogendra is another entrepreneur who started his journey at a very young age. He started with various web and e-commerce projects after dropping out of engineering at the age of 19. As he went deeper into this space, he went on to launch an e-commerce portal of his own. Eventually he launched the accommodation portal Stayzilla. With the message ‘Make room for something new’, this year Stayzilla shifted focus to homestays and other form of alternative stays.

Talking about his learning from the same, Yogendra said, “Indians are not really closed minded or fragmented by various lines of preference as we like to believe. We are witnessing a beautiful expression of opening up homes or extra rooms for a variety of demographics and an ease with which homeowners have adopted the concept. Although they can select at deeper levels on basis language and food habits, we are seeing the selections happening at a very broad level of traveller type and there is a larger openness in the people than we actually believe exists. Indian homeowners are much more open when it comes to hosting guests and I believe this was the biggest learning of 2015 for us at Stayzilla.”

Sankalp Agarwal, Co-founder and CEO, TravelTriangle

With entrepreneurship in his blood, Sankalp Agarwal is the co-founder of TravelTriangle, India’s first full-stack holiday marketplace. At TravelTriangle, he leads the company vision and is intrinsically involved in fundraising, business growth & creating a world class team. He held a lucrative post at Adobe before his own entrepreneurial venture. His innovative nature led him to tackle various technological gaps in day to day life during his college days and he is trying to do something similar for travellers with TravelTriangle.

Emphasising the right growth strategy for a startup, he said, “For a business the first and foremost thing is to chase 100 fans. In the category having 100 fans who will talk about you is way better than having 1 million people liking you. As for a startup- look at the growth in this way. One starts from the garage moves on to a small office which leads to a tribe of followers converting into a village and eventually a nation. When you are in garage phase you have to invest in the product, relentlessly pursue the product till there is traction and as you move into a small office get the generalist and right product market fit people. Once you move to a tribe format you will need specialist like Marketing- HR function to take care of your business. It’s a constant process of evolution which comes through growing with right intent.”

Gautam Shewakramani, Founder & CEO, AudioCompass

Born and brought up in Mumbai, Gautam did his undergrad in Computer Science and Film and then went on to business school at MIT Sloan in Boston. After moving back to his home, he spent some time actively working with and seed investing in startups and that is when he got inspired to start AudioCompass. AudioCompass offers audio guidebooks for a large number of tourist attractions through a very simple mobile app. This year AudioCompass expanded to Oman and also won the Start Tel Aviv award.

Highlighting the importance of business associations, Gautam said, “One of the biggest challenges for us in building AudioCompass has been convincing some of the legacy travel industry players that customers are ready for change. In travel, change has been demand driven, i.e. consumers are demanding change before suppliers are offering it. AudioCompass’ early success and validation has come from the fact that we saw a gap and anticipated the consumer need of wanting to be empowered while traveling.”

Abdul Hadi Shaikh, CEO, Fxkart.com

Exchanging money is a hassle in India and there is a lack of information about the processes and formalities. Dr. Mushtaq Shah, who was head of research for Equinox Capital Management, founded Fxkart after facing the problem dealing with individual Forex dealers during his frequent international trips. After founding Fxkart, he got Abdul Hadi Shaikh on-board as CEO. Abdul was the head of research at Ratings Intelligence, an ethical investment advisory firm in London before joining Fxkart. After the launch this year, Fxkart was quick to introduce a mobile app and partner with AirAsia.

Speaking from his experience of building a marketplace business, Abdul Hadi Shaikh said, “As an aggregator our biggest challenge was to work on both sides of the business. We thought that enabling tech for the dealers would be the easier part but we really had to swim against the tide to get 650+ dealer locations while the customers adopted quickly. That was something we didn’t expect but that was ground reality. Learning – Assumptions are good but they are not necessarily the right way”

Sidharth Gupta, Co-Founder, Treebo Hotels

The budget hotel industry has seen lot of activity this year and another startup that stood out in this space is Treebo Hotels. Treebo Hotels officially started in June and raised series A funds from Matrix and SAIF Partners in June itself, making it one of the fastest series A fund raised by a tech startup since inception. The co-founder Sidharth comes with a very strong educational background and has worked with McKinsey and Company for years before joining hands with Rahul Chaudhary and Kadam Jeet Jain to start Treebo Hotels.

Focusing on the value offered by a startup, Sidharth said, “In the current heady environment it’s easy for new entrepreneurs to be misled into doing a lot of jazzy things, quickly. It’s also easy for them to believe that funding and PR are their given rights! But I think founders need to first ask themselves the question – ‘What is our single biggest value addition to the customer’s life?’ ‘What is our reason for existence?’ ‘What is our core?’. They must develop clarity on this, and then relentlessly work on offering this value to the customer over and over again. Once you get this right everything else – growth, funding, revenue, PR, etc. – will follow”

Benny Kao, Co-Founder, TripVerse

Benny has always been fascinated with technology and how it changes the world. He holds experience of working with some big names in the industry. Being an avid traveller, he often faced problem managing his trips with the existing tools which inspired him to start TripVerse. TripVerse allows travellers to discover authentic user generated trip ideas and create their own itineraries to keep them informed even offline. Recently the startup was selected to be a part of Amadeus’ travel startup initiative Amadeus Next.

Emphasising the importance of simplifying user experience, Benny said, “With so much information available on the internet, travel planning isn’t really easier and simpler than before. The information overload we have today might have made travel planning a more lengthy process. I believe true value lies in presenting travellers information that is relevant and actionable”

Kunal Jain, Co-Founder, Your Local Cousin

It isn’t easy to plan activities for your trip when you are travelling there for the first time. The problem takes another scale, especially when you are travelling to an international destination. This inspired Kunal to start Your Local Cousin. It is a peer to peer service which connects travellers to a local expert and as travellers look for the human connect in travel, such services are picking up fast. This allows them to explore like a local and not like a tourist.

Kunal emphasised on the importance of networking and said, “Sitting behind your laptop and plugging away all day is not a healthy way to build a startup / business. You should get out, meet people and have a social life and the sooner you figure this out the better you’ll think and perform mentally”

You can also download our list of travel industry predictions by industry experts for the year 2016 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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From a mattress in an apartment to a $20 billion company, Airbnb has grown at a crazy pace and is termed as one of the biggest disruptors in travel industry. It is world’s largest accommodation company and is still experiencing strong growth all across the globe. On October 20, during the WIT Conference, Julian Persaud, Regional Director, APAC, Airbnb shared his views on the role of Asia in growth of Airbnb. Here are some pointers we picked from ‘Coffee with Julian Persaud’.

Julian sharing Airbnb’s plans for Asian market

Key to success in China

Commenting on the growth the company in China, he said that one of the many reasons Airbnb picked up in China is because the modern Chinese travellers have a different state of mind. The trend has shifted from group travellers to independent travellers. Another contributor is the welcoming nature of hosts as most of them are older and don’t travel much anymore but appreciate young people coming to them and sharing their stories.

Data science and advertising

Persaud comes with years of experience of working with Google but when asked about the preferable advertising option, he stated that there is no bias towards Google. The marketing strategy includes a mix of different platforms and they favour whatever works best for them. Data science plays a very important role in the whole process to understand the impact of each channel. He also emphasised on the importance of innovative offline activities like they did in Korea by associating with Korean popstar G-dragon. Such activities drive word of mouth marketing and help a brand gain traction.

Learning from hotels

It was very obvious that the point will come up and Airbnb will be compared to the hotels. According to Persaud, Airbnb isn’t a substitute for hotels. Airbnb is more about experiences than just being a provider for accommodation. People prefer hotels for short stays and Airbnb for relatively longer stays but the line between the two is blurred.

Talking about Airbnb for Business, he said that 10% of the users are business travellers and most of them are people who have to stay for weeks. He said that they have a lot to learn from the hotels, especially the large hotel chains, on maintaining quality and being a better host.

Building around Airbnb

During the conversation, he talked about many startups that have been built around Airbnb and similar businesses. There are startups that will help control the appliances remotely to reduce electricity wastage or clear the wardrobe for guests. Persaud expressed that it is great to see such innovations and while Airbnb isn’t investing in these startups, things might change in future.

Experimenting for Indian market

Talking about the plans for Indian market, he said that Airbnb has a strong focus on India. Airbnb surely sees the local players like Stayzilla and TG Stays as strong competition but Julian said that competition is good as it prepares the market and they are still experimenting in India.

You can find all our other stories from TravelRave here.

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