"OYO is not an aggregator, marketplace or e-comm company": Aditya Ghosh

“Growing up in India, I remember getting off a flight or a train in a new city and the first person we would end up arguing with is the tout. The tout would take you to the hotel that pays him the highest commission. At this point you know that you’re being cheated. The only question is how much. Next, the hotelier quotes a price based on your appearance and accomplices.” This was among the introductory sentences from Aditya Ghosh, chief executive officer, India and South Asia, OYO Hotels and Homes, while he unravelled the brand’s journey at Google for India — Google’s annual event in India.

“Over the last six years, we’ve tried to eliminate the need to ask a stranger which hotel you should pick in a strange city,” Ghosh asserted.

Ghosh revealed that ruling out middlemen, reducing the haggling, ensuring amenities and streamlining customer support are the few key things that OYO has done since its existence. OYO started out with one hotel in Gurgaon. Today it boasts of a humongous one million rooms in 33,000 hotels across 80 countries globally, becoming the third largest hotel company globally and 19x bigger than its closest competitor in India.

Ghosh claimed that OYO isn’t an aggregator, neither was it a marketplace, nor an e-commerce company. “We actually operate and run hotels including the quality, pricing and the revenue management just like any other hotel company that you’d see. We own the customer experience,” he said.

Ghosh reveals that guest different types of hotels basing on various aspects like purpose, companions, duration, etc. This further led to the creation of OYO sub brands like the affordable OYO Spot On and OYO Rooms, millennial focused Collection O, executive focused Silver Keys, business brand Capital O, etc., based on customer segments and behaviour.

OYO is pushing its reach to go deeper into the Tier 2/3 cities. As a company, Ghosh puts the OYO identity as 2/2 split personality. “We are a tech driven company at heart but we are a tech-driven business. Again, one hand we are a six year old baby also the third largest in the world,” Ghosh says.

In terms of reach, Ghosh points out that while on one hand India is a mobile-first nation, it is also a mobile only nation in many cases given the first experience with tech on mobile, falling mobile proces and pocket friendly data. The users of mobile internet has increased while the broadband users curve has stagnated. Thus giving rise to a robust mobile strategy for the brand. A step in those lines was the OYO lite app launched in 2019 which was 90 per cent less heavy than the main OYO app.

Speaking on OYO’s ad strategy, Ghosh says, “I am not a big spender on large TV ads. If I am to spend money on advertisement, it has to be for the right customer, at the right place at the right cost. We have gladly paid 3.5 times of what we spent earlier only on digital marketing, which is twice the industry benchmark.” About 80 per cent of OYO’s overall advertising spends is on digital ads.