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Online budget room aggregator Vista Rooms is planning to raise $10 million as part of Series A as it expands into new segments like homestays, hostels and student accommodation.
“Having raised an angel round through HNIs, we are now ready for Series A funding. But market sentiment is low. We have to wait and watch before we can go in for raising money which is going to be about $ 10 million,” said Ankita Sheth, Co-Founder, Vista Rooms.
With 800 Vista-branded rooms, the start-up is open to experimenting new categories such as service apartments, resorts and havelis and extending its homestay segment into these categories. “We have looked into segments like hostels and student accommodation. Hostels are about building communities and are a different business to handle than budget rooms. Even student accommodation is a different market but we have done a pilot in Pune. These are long stays than the typical budget hotels and have to handled differently,’’ added Sheth.
Vista Rooms is now tapping into the corporate segment by engaging with offline players like Cox & Kings and Thomas Cook. For instance, it would be selling its rooms through the online portals of both these offline players to target corporates engaging in business and leisure.
“We are into inventory sharing with the offline players since their market is huge. Through their online platform we will access their offline corporate clients,’’ she added.
In fact, in the case of Thomas Cook, Vista Rooms has engaged with the travel company on its B2B platform which reaches out to corporates with its hotels.
However, Vista Rooms does not intend selling its low-end properties below ₹1,000 a room night through the offline travel companies. The average ticket size of its rooms sold through the offline players would be upwards of ₹2,000 without any ‘deep’ discounting which is generally associated with the online players.
Besides the need to tap into offline travel agents also stems from the fact that budget aggregators have been offloaded from OTA(online travel agents) like Make My Trip and Goibibo.
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