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Online bookings put end to hotel woes

hotel-booking
KOLKATA: On his first business trip to Ambala a couple of years ago, Shyambazar resident Sumit Ghosh had a horrid experience. Unfamiliar with the town, he had depended on the client to make a hotel reservation. It turned out to be a poorly maintained guest house. Though Ghosh had shifted to a hotel soon afterwards, it didn’t merit the Rs 4,000 per night tariff. When Ghosh went to Ambala again last week, he checked into an Oyo Rooms hotel on his mobile and checked in, paying Rs 1,499 a night.

Anwesha Dutta of Ballygunge has always seen her father book hotels through a travel agent. And then they would pray that hotel was a decent one. Ismail, who is now an event management professional, books hotels online after checking the rooms and services on offer, usually on Goibibo. When her colleagues and friends travel to Kolkata, they use Oyo Rooms, Stayzilla and Goibibo to make reservations at budget hotels.

“The key things that I look for in a hotel are location, hygiene, comfort and safety. Traditionally, one got out of a station in a small town, hailed a cab and then depended on the driver to find a hotel that suited the budget. In metro cities, one coughed up Rs 5,000-6,000 for a night stay. That has changed with hotels rooms now available online. One can select hotel location, check the room, look at facilities and book it without hassle,” Ghosh pointed out.

According to online booking platform Goibibo, one in every two travellers from Kolkata book their hotel rooms online. “Travellers look for reliability and predictability in hotels. Online booking platforms give travellers access to little-known budget hotels. Since they get to rate and review the hotels, it also keeps the hotel management on their toes to ensure that the service standard does not dip. Also, instead of mood-based or arbitrary pricing that earlier existed, there is dynamic tariff now,” Ibibo group chief executive Ashish Kashyap told TOI.

With travellers now being able to access budget hotels, 80% are opting for smaller hotels, guest houses, service apartments like zostel instead of bigger known brands. Such is the explosive growth in this category that Goibibo.com has introduced an exclusive platform for budget hotels. There are 20,000 hotels on this platform now with 2,500 being added every month.

According to Kavikrut, head expansion at Oyo Rooms, the booking application it launched three months ago has already had 300,000 downloads with 45% of the bookings now being done. “Till a few years ago, there were three things that one needed to do in advance when travelling to another city: book an air or train ticket; book a hotel and book a car. With the advent of app-based cabs Ola and Uber, no one bothers about advance car booking now. It will be similar in hotels.

We have dovetailed the app in a way that one can also book a taxi ride to the hotel and can request room service using the phone,” he said.

Of the 550-odd budget hotels with 6,000-plus rooms in Kolkata, Oyo has 17 properties with nearly 170 rooms. “We will increase the hotel count to 25 in a couple of weeks and add hotels in four more towns of Bengal in a month,” said Kavikrut, adding that plans were afoot to launch Oyo WE (Women Exclusive) hotels in Kolkata.

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