Reverse-bidding platform Find My Stay ropes in budget-hotel aggregators

Reverse hotel-bidding platform Find My Stay is targeting budget aggregators such as OYO Rooms, FabHotels and Treebo as new clients on its marketplace with discounts which can go up to 40 per cent of the original rates.

With Online Travel Aggregators (OTAs) such as MakeMyTrip and Goibibo offloading such budget aggregators, Find My Stay is using the opportunity to add a new segment on its platform, which already has about 3,000 hotel listings.

Rohit Khetrapal, co-founder, Find My Stay, said: “We have recently added start-ups such as OYO Rooms and Treebo Hotels to help them fill their unsold room inventory just like we do for the rest of the hotels on our site. Since such budget-room aggregators are no longer listed on OTAs like MakeMyTrip, we see this as an opportunity to give further discounts for such budget aggregators.”

With its reverse-bidding model, which allows customers to decide the price of the hotel rooms, Find My Stay is already competing with larger OTAs in the hotel segment.

The platform will be adding more discounts to the already discounted rates of the budget-hotel aggregators, Khetrapal said.

“Start ups like OYO Rooms are already discounting, and with reverse bidding, the discounts could go up to 30-40 per cent for the rooms.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Find My Stay is also roping in luxury properties such as Leela Hotels, Trident, St. Regis and Taj.

It is currently testing a couple of properties of the luxury chains to go up the value chain. “So far, we have been mostly into affordable luxury hotels; but now, we are in the process of integrating and testing with the Leela Group for two of its properties,” he added.

Besides, the firm is also engaging with corporates such as Sony Music and Network 18 with its enterprise-based solutions to ease the travel expenses and budgets of their employees.

Find My Stay currently covers 41 cities and expects to enter new markets in South-East Asia and West Asia. It has listed hotels from the three-star segment and upwards, including the likes of The Lalit, The Park, Radisson and Planet Hollywood.

It charges a commission of 15 per cent for every room-booking. The two-year-old start-up has raised about $1 million from the Indian Angel Network as part of pre-Series A, and is now gearing up for Series A by the end of the year. “The climate may not be good to raise funds, but we will approach VCs in the next few months to raise between $3-5 million with Series A,” Khetrapal said.

COMMENT NOW