Technological intervention has affected nearly every industry, but one of the areas its impact has been felt the most is in the travel and hospitality sectors. Just like booking a cab has now become a spur-of-the-moment decision, so too has booking a hotel room. This is something Oyo has known from the start, and the company has been working on improving the tech that goes into streamlining the consumer-facing and business aspects of its operation for a while now. The man responsible for most of these activities, Oyo’s Chief Technology Officer Anil Goel, was in Bengaluru recently, and offered some insights into Oyo’s moves.
Goel says that the company continues to focus on its franchise-based business model, but is also working on expanding into other aspects of the hospitality industry. It launched Townhouse, a full stack operation completely managed by Oyo, in January last year, and set up over thirty of them, with the aim being to take that number above 200 by the end of 2018, while maintaining its current business model and expanding into new markets (Oyo also operates in Malaysia, Nepal, and more recently, China).
“We see ourselves as a real estate and hospitality technology company. We will operate in any sector where there is an opportunity for us to improve the industry through technology and generate value for customers. We want to change the way people stay away from home,” Goel says.
Change, however, does not come from the customer. Most of Goel’s work has been focused on updating back-end processes and providing hotel owners and operators as well as Oyo’s own ground staff with the tools to optimise processes. “We have 20-plus front-end technology products which power experience for each stakeholder in our ecosystem, whether they are a customer, hotel owner, property manager or internal workforce,” says Goel, explaining that the company has created products for the property manager to help manage inventory, the owner to measure statistics and net profit and loss, for auditing purposes to help with field audits, and for business development managers to get property insights and strategise better. “We’ve also launched travel packages, conference and banquet hall facilities, and a portal for travel agents,” Goel explains, expanding upon the philosophy that there is nothing Oyo will not try, if it thinks it can make it better.
That said, Goel’s team has not lost sight of its primary business, and he says that there are some interesting projects the company is working on. Chief among these is increasing the efficiency of the check-in process. “We’re working on implementing a digital register, as the current legal mandate to maintain a physical register is cumbersome for the staff, the authorities tasked with verifying the information, and for guests who have to enter the same information again, even if they have visited the property before. We are working with a few state governments on implementing a digital register, which will help not just us, but also the industry as a whole.”
The digital register, Goel says, is just a precursor to Oyo’s larger plans. Another project his team is working on is digital door locks. “As long as you have to sign a register at the front desk, it makes sense to pick up your keys there. But once your information is registered digitally, we’re looking at implementing digital keys that allow guests to walk in and go straight to their rooms and enter. Beyond that, the research is focused on being able to control utilities through voice, or remotely.”
Goel admits that his team is cognizant of the risks associated with the rewards of implementing these facilities. “Privacy and security are important to us, and we’re looking at all aspects of the problem, and trying to ensure maximum security to the system and the data it contains, from both external and internal threats.”
Oyo is also working on machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). The company is already letting a bot handle basic customer interaction, and its entire inventory is managed on the fly by algorithms that estimate demand and adjust room prices and juggle inventory.
It might be a while before that hotel room of the future becomes an accessible and taken-for-granted reality. But somewhere in Oyo’s engineering departments in Gurugram and Hyderabad, the work continues.