I stayed at two OYO rooms properties last month to understand the value they offer, pros and cons of staying with them and what is their promise to travellers. I also spoke in detail with Kavikrut, Chief Growth Officer at OYO on why a traveller should stay with OYO.
If you live in any large city in India, you are probably not very far from a hotel touting the name of OYO rooms. OYO has expanded rapidly in recent months and has a large number of budget accommodation choices, now spread over hundred cities across India.
OYO Rooms proposition: predictability, availabily, accessibility, affordability
Kavikrut, Chief Growth Officer at OYO confirms that they are rapidly expanding and bringing in a large number of hotels under their brand name. This is evident when you look for a room on their website. A quick search for Delhi returns 223 hotels. In Bangalore, they have 154 and 59 in Ahmedabad. They also have a presence in holiday destinations such as Ooty, Alleppey or Darjeeling, though in much smaller numbers.
The rapid expansion has been possible by working with existing budget to mid-range hotels and branding them as OYO. The hotels are managed by the property-owners according to a given set of standards and are marketed by OYO. According to Kavikrut, having a large number of choices ensures guaranteed availability–one of the four key values that OYO intends to provide. Others being affordability, accessibility and predictability.
A considerable number of their accommodations are priced at Rs.999. On the higher side, prices rarely go beyond Rs.3,000. OYO intends to work with properties within this budgets range in large cities, while they may add more expensive accommodations in leisure holiday destinations.
For the predictability part, OYO makes some minor modifications and improvements to the rooms to fit to their standards. They boast of a 250-checkpoint standardization in their rooms that offers some certainty to the guests walking in. This includes the facilities available in the room such as the type of linen, mattress, air-conditioning, wifi, type of showers and consummable materials. A frequent quality audit conducted by an OYO staff at the property ensures that everything is maintained in order.
How much of these work as claimed? I had a chance to stay at two OYO properties last month to discover this myself.
During my visit to Fort Kochi last month, I stayed in 16th and 17th century bungalows that also hosted the likes of Vasco da Gama, governers of Portugese and Dutch administration, a French Admiral and a British Major.
About a month ago, universe conspired that I should take a holiday in Fort Kochi. I had scheduled a work-related visit to Cochin and my air tickets were all booked. Just as the dates approached–I still hadn’t planned my accommodation–I was invited by Neemrana to visit and experience their two non-hotel hotels in Fort Kochi. And two days before departure, all my work commitments in Kochi were cancelled, enabling me to enjoy an undisturbed beach-side holiday.
My first day at Fort Kochi was spent at Le Colonial, a 16th century bungalow that has witnessed much of Kochi’s recorded history. It was established as the governor’s residence when the then small fishing village was gifted by Raja of Kochi to the Portuguese. It continued to serve the same purpose more than a century later, even after the area came under Dutch control . Fort Kochi changed hands again and came under British rule another one-and-a-half centuries later, in the last decade of 18th century, and remained in their hands until the day of independence.
Now a boutique hotel since it last changed hands into Neemrana, Le Colonial has just seven rooms carefully decorated to reflect the days of it’s past. The rooms aren’t numbered, but named after personalities associated with the building. My room was named after Mahe de la Bourdonnais, who happened to spend a night here on his way from Pondicherry to Mahe.
It may be obvious to you by now that I spend a lot of time travelling. Naturally, this means spending several nights in hotels across the country. This also creates an opportunity to review those hotels and spread the word about good and bad things about the places I have stayed in. But so far, I have refrained.
I can’t think of a reason why I wasn’t doing hotel reviews so far. Perhaps I thought reviews are better left to TripAdvisor. Perhaps I thought it was something too commercial or may be I simply assumed this is not a place for hotel reviews.
But I started thinking otherwise a few months ago, when I began searching TripAdvisor to get information about hotels in some destinations. The reviews were often very contrasting and sometimes misleading. While some reviewers said that a hotel is the best choice, there were an equal number of people who said exactly the opposite. In some cases, it appeared likely that the reviews were rigged. And in some cases, unusually harsh reviews made me wonder if competitors were trying to defame the property. It wasn’t easy to qualify a hotel through the ratings and reviews on TripAdvisor or similar sources.
This, added with the fact that I spend many days staying at hotels, made me think it is probably worthwhile posting hotel reviews here. While I may never reach the volumes and coverage of a crowd sourced review system, at least I may be able to provide more accurate and trusted reviews of a few hotels in a few destinations.
Keeping this in mind, I will be starting hotel reviews on this site in near future. However, to prevent flooding this blog’s main page with reviews, I would be posting them as wordpress pages instead of blog posts. Only a monthly summary would be posted here as a blog post.
Your comments, if any on this, is welcome.