Hotel room aggregator Oyo turns profitable

Online aggregator of branded network of hotels OYO has turned profitable at a netwok-level across its presence in 170 cities of India.

The SoftBank-backed company, which had already been posting operating profits till June 2015, had a slower growth since last few months following an aggressive expansion mode to gain market leadership.

It has regained profitability since February 2016 at a network-level, a company statement said.

The cities driving profitability for the company are those that have matured over the last year which include Gurgaon, Delhi, Hyderabad and Kolkata. The company plans to grow and triple its inventory by December 2016. Currently it has over 5500 hotels. 

Oyo's founder Ritesh Agarwal said that  “OYO’s strong performance is the result of our sharp focus on the quality of guest experience. We have utilized our technology, data science capabilities and the benefits of scale to achieve high number of repeat guests and growth in OYO’s brand recognition."

He further added that the success in the domestic hotels space will not be driven by size or discounting but with a customer focus and differentiating factor.

Oyo has delivered a 15x annual growth with 2.3 million booked room-night transactions in first quarter of calendar year 2016 while its GMV continues to grow substantially every month.

95% of the traffic comes from its own sales channels such as app, web and call-centre. 

It is planning to launch properties in the international market as well.