Seshagiri, a businessman from Coimbatore, was in a spot of bother last week. Arriving in Bengaluru late one evening, he realised that he had forgotten his house keys back in Coimbatore. Unfazed, he whipped out his smartphone and logged onto RoomsTonite to book a room for the night and got a 77 per cent discount. RoomsTonite, a last-minute hotel booking mobile app that went live in January, not only provides users branded hotel rooms at unbelievable prices but also allows hoteliers to cash in on unsold room inventory.

Available on iOS and Android platforms, RoomsTonite offers 1.2 lakh hotel rooms in luxury, premium and comfort categories across 275 locations in India, and has been downloaded by over 100,000 users to date. Depending on what time a booking is made you could get discounts varying from 30 to 93 per cent.

Founder and CEO of RoomsTonite Suresh John, who also runs IDS Next, a global technology solutions provider to the hospitality industry, said, “Forty per cent of hotel rooms remain unsold, as average occupancy rates in India hover between 50-60 per cent. We decided to use our domain expertise to build an on-demand, last-minute, mobile-only marketplace for hotels with a dynamic pricing system that will help them price their rooms based on the demand and supply on any given day.”

For every transaction made, RoomsTonite gets a small transaction fee. A maximum of three rooms can be booked at one go and a maximum of three nights, which is non-cancellable and non-refundable.

“Last week we received a booking at 11.58 pm just two minutes before midnight, where the user reached the hotel at 3 am and had to check out at 11 am, all within 11 hours,” said John, who aspires to replicate the ‘Uber experience’ for hotel room bookings with RoomsTonite and have 500,000 rooms over the next 12 months.

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