Online reputation management platform RepUp.co is eyeing business from Indian hospitality chains such as the Taj Group and Oberoi, as it also expands its services across new markets in Europe.

Servicing nearly 500 hotels in India, ranging from ITC Fortune, Lemon Tree and Sarovar Hotels to tech-driven budget hotels like FabHotels, across 22 cities, the year-old start-up is now hoping to close deals with major hospitality chains.

Pranjal Prashar, founder and CEO, RepUp, said: “We capture data to bring out the service element in hotels and align it to their pricing. We are already working with the top 10 Indian hotel brands, and are in talks with bigger chains like the Taj and Oberoi.”

Measuring reputation

While RepUp considers itself to be the biggest player in the segment in India, there are several other B2B start-ups in this space — such as Medallia (which currently services the Taj Group), Revinate and Rate Gain — providing services using tech-driven data in the area of reputation management.

RepUp helps hotels measure, benchmark and improve the user experience of their guests.

“The reputation of any hotel plays a very crucial role in making or breaking the revenues, because any customer, before choosing a particular hotel property, intensely scrutinises its reputation on various social-media platforms. With RepUp, we bring in a proprietary tool that crawls through multiple platforms and collate positive/negative reviews on one platform for hotels to see.”

RepUp has already made an international foray and is providing its data services to hotels in France. “Our next target is 3,000 hotels in the three- and four-star segment in Europe. But, closing deals with bigger hotels chains in the enterprise segment may take longer. We want to reach the next stage of funding as we make an international foray, for which we are going in for further fund-raising of $2.5 million in Series A,” added Prashar.

In Europe, RepUp has forged a revenue-sharing partnership with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) player Boostin, to reduce the cost of doing business. It has on-boarded a couple of hotels in France.

The start-up had raised a seed round of $0.5 million from Indian Angel Network. With a subscription-based model, RepUp currently charges $100-$150 (about Rs ₹7,000) a month from each hotel. It expects to grow at 8-9 per cent and generate a revenue of ₹3 crore this fiscal.

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