Stay Simple Resorts, a Bengaluru-based mid budget leisure resort chain, is planning to enhance its capacity to over 2,000 rooms in the next six months, from the ₹5 crore it raised recently.

The company founded in 2008 by four professionals, led by founder and Managing Director Gopalkrishna Kulkarni, currently owns, manages and operates about 500 rooms in 16 resorts, across 12 tourist destinations in India.

“We recently raised angel funding from marquee investors, including the family office of Sudhir and Shalini Sethi (Sethi is the Chairman of IDG Ventures India) and Praveen Someshwar (Sales Head, PepsiCo, AsiaPac),” Kulkarni told BusinessLine .

“With this recent funding, we aim to expand to newer locations, for which plans are getting finalised,” he added.

“There is no resort chain today catering to the leisure market and the sector is completely served by the standalone resorts, which the customer finds difficult to appraise and make a booking confidently,” Kulkarni said.

Explaining the business model, Kulkarni said, “Stay Simple follows an asset light model. Within this we have two models. First, the Lease model, wherein we are responsible for the P&L of the resort and operations are directly handled by us. Second, the Management model, where the owner continues to run the resort with our procedures and training, but marketing and sales is done by us under the Stay Simple brand.”

Talking about challenges, he said that training people continues to be one of the biggest challenges. Being an unorganised sector, creating a sense of belonging among the employees and training them to understand the customers’ needs is an ongoing process.

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