Online Hotel Bookings to Touch US$1.8 bn

The hotel-booking space is seeing a lot of action lately, right from investments to new models and acceptance from customer in form of trusting the app to book their room. It’s exciting and challenging, for a company to assure the customer that selecting a room online is ‘more’ than (what) meet their eye: quality, value-for-money, last minute and comes with a discounted pricing.
According to the rating agency ICRA, the hotel industry to set to touch US$ 1.8 billion by the next year, and within the sector, the same report mentioned, the hotel-booking holds largest potential. The agency report also mentioned although online hotel bookings account for 16 per cent of the total bookings, it will increase to 25 per cent by 2016. Online booking is as much as 70 per cent in Europe and 40 per cent in the United States.
With 300 million Internet users today, (as reported by IMAI) online hotel bookings have enough headroom to capitalise on the high growth potential of the space. New concepts are emerging and disrupting the space today. RoomsTonite, a mobile-app only platform is one such concept, helping customers with last-minute hotel booking. The app enables users to book hotels for the same day or up to three days/nights including the booking day.    
The app becomes even more useful for those travellers whose travel plans get firmed up at the last minute. Retailer media caught up with its Founder & CEO, Suresh John who is a hospitality and travel industry veteran to talk about the last-minute hotel booking model, current tie-ups and how smart-phones usage is the primary driver of online booking space.

How many hotels have you tied up with and why should a customer book a room with RoomsTonite?
The app has been meticulously designed to enable customers to enjoy the lowest rates when booking a hotel room at a short notice. We have currently tied up with more than 4000 hotels spread across 325 (plus) locations in India. The marketplace model allows hotels to sell their unsold inventories at the last minute and we offer hotels under three categories – Luxury, Premium and Comfort. The direct connectivity with hotels ensures a seamless room booking experience at every step.

What is your current inventory and expected target?
Currently, we are offering vacation homes in Phuket, Pattaya and Bali. We are also planning to expand to Middle East and other South East Asian countries. In the next 6 months, we are targeting to partner with 10,000 hotels across 500 cities.

Why do you think the hotel space in India has massive potential?
We believe that selling the distressed inventory has huge potential at this point. Also, hotel bookings via mobile apps have a huge potential as more than 87 per cent of people book for various travel related purposes via smart-phones, be it their hotel rooms, flight or train tickets.

How are you leveraging on the growing travel retail scene in India?
According to a recent study by Google, more than 55 per cent of the people access travel information via their smart-phones. Keeping that in mind, we are firsts in last minute hotel booking app available only on mobiles. The trend of travelling at the last minute is becoming highly popular among people here. Apart from last minute business travels, millennial also tend to plan last minute getaways. RoomsTonite helps in selling distressed inventory of hotels at best last minute possible rates as compared to other OTAs.