OYO plans big leisure push

CHENNAI: Gurugram-based hotel room aggregator OYO Rooms wants to diversify its business to sharpen focus on assisting leisure travellers find hotels even as it grows its bread and butter segment of aggregating accommodations in business centres across metropolises and towns in the country. OYO gets well over 70% of its business from these business centres, with the momentum remaining in the budget segment.

"Leisure is a market we are fast growing. This year, leisure will be a huge focus area.We are deploying a lot of our talent and investments there. This year, we believe we can bring the business-leisure ratio of our market exposure to 60:40 or even equal to each other," Ritesh Agarwal, the 23-year-old founder and CEO of OYO told reporters in Chennai.

OYO had been planning the leisure push for the past one year. "We are seeing in India a huge trend. Holidays are becoming shorter and more frequent, more regular. Travel is increasing like never before. So, we want to be where our customers are going." The plan for OYO is to leverage the jump in summertime holidaying to expand its leisure hotel network.

OYO is aggressively expanding its hotel network in Chennai, which contributes to 7% of the company's 70,000-strong room inventory. It is already present in seven cities in Tamil Nadu. The company operates its business on both franchised and self-managed properties with franchising being the dominant method. The company has so far raised $200 million.