Oyo, based out of Gurugram, is all set to acquire and manage the four star hotel chains in India, cited ET. The softbank funded hospitality chain wants to spread its footprints in the four star hotels segment in India and its likely to tie up with other companies in order to acquires, manage or lease the hotels pan-India.
While, according to the sources, the work on this development has begun and Oyo has set an integral target of reaching 5000 rooms by the end of 2019 through such partnerships.
“Funded by SoftBank, this corpus kept aside for the partnership is for four star hotels in India. Oyo is getting into the four star hotels business in India via such partnerships for which they are going to be acquiring, leasing and managing hotels under a new brand that they are creating,” said an anonymous source.
“They are extremely aggressive with the vision that they want to have 5000 rooms through these partnerships. This is not the aggregator model. 5000 rooms means that the average size of the room per hotel could be 100 rooms and they want to buy, lease or manage 50 hotels by the end of the year,” the source added.
The SoftBank backed hospitality chain Oyo was started by Ritesh Agarwal in 2013. The startup was started from a single hotel to over 8500 hotels at present. It is the fastest growing network of hotels, offline and online and the current evaluation is over $400 million.
At present, the company operates more than 23,000 properties with more than 850,000 rooms, making it the world’s sixth-largest lodging provider by its own measure.
“Currently, Oyo provides guests a premium experience at competitive prices via its upper-end leisure resorts category of Palette Resorts in India. The discussion is at an early stage and we have no further comments at this time,” one of the company’s spokesperson said.
Albeit, being the country’s highest valuated hospitality chain, Oyo competes with other ace players that fall under the similar category such as Yatra, Fabhotels, Treebo, MakeMyTrip, ClearTrip.