If I were product manager at OYO
Introduction
This blog is an attempt to understand OYO’s business model and its product offerings. It also contains few interesting ideas which could add significant value to OYO brand. All suggestions are based on analysis of information available in public domain.
Company Overview
OYO is world’s leading chain of hotels and homes with more than 43,000 hotels across 80 countries. It was started in May 2013 by young entrepreneur Ritesh Agarwal who believed that there was a massive dearth of affordable and good-quality hotels in the unbranded budget hotel category. He did that by upgrading bland, generic spaces and places and designing them with next-gen chic and design moxie and offering them at varied price points.
OYO’s product offerings are spread across from economy hotels (OYO rooms) to upmarket resorts (Pallete). Other offerings include OYO Living (millennial housing), OYO Townhouse, OYO SilverKey (Corporate Apartments) and OYO Homes (Vacation rentals).
Business Model
OYO works on mix of room aggregator and franchise business model.
· It leases out few rooms from partner hotels well in advance.
· List these hotel rooms on their digital platform — OYO app with their brand name — OYO rooms.
· These partner hotels provided standardized service to customers of those rooms.
Oyo Rooms has step by step moved its focus from being an aggregator to managing the complete hotel property on the behalf of hotel owners. With these exclusive tie-ups, Oyo presently sells the whole inventory of hotels under its very own branding.
Hotels benefit by this tie-up because being listed on the OYO platform gives them more traction (as Oyo is an established brand) and helps them acquire more business.
My Recommendations
The following are few suggestions which could help improve product offerings for OYO.
· Different sub-brands: Currently same OYO brand is used for upscale hotels/ villas and small very low budget hotels in small lanes. I think the OYO brand gets diluted when it is shown against shabby small buildings and people perceive it as cheap brand. Creating a separate brand for each segment may help to build brand value and attract customers of respective segments.
· Segment wise messaging: Although OYO does not do much of advertising on mediums like print and TV, but if they can create separate messaging/ advertisements for each segment it will be very helpful as people will be able to understand product offerings more effectively.
· New business model: OYO has access to vast property, and they can make use of these space to convert hotel rooms into small meeting rooms or co-working spaces so that regular small business travelers do not need to book separate meeting rooms but can use the one in the same hotel.
· Contact less entry: There are many business travelers who don’t want to spend their morning time standing in check-in queues, hence create a check-in kiosk where the guest can directly so self-check-in and collect the keys will be real value addition to guest experience.
