Ritesh Agarwal: Oyo now sees one room booked every 3 seconds

Ritesh Agarwal, CEO of Oyo Rooms

If data is knowledge, few know India better than its entrepreneurs. One is Ritesh Agarwal, the CEO of Oyo Rooms. It’s a company that aggregates hotel rooms – generally in low traffic locations – and markets them at discounted prices on its site.

Ritesh spoke today at Tech in Asia Bangalore 2016 and shared some of the stats that he’s collected. Ritesh talked about Oyo’s growth – nearly 15 times in a single year, with more than 750,000 bookings completed each month.

Those stats seem to be an answer to criticisms of his business model. If rooms are not booked, Oyo still pays and marks them as “blocked.” If those unused rooms were counted in the stats he released, they would inflate numbers and make the startup a Ponzi scheme.

Ritesh explained that his latest stats only included booked rooms and added in a flashy number: an Oyo room is booked once every three seconds.

“We are where we are because of the media,” he added, “but I just wish there were more checks and balances.”

Some fun facts:

• 28 percent of people book Oyo rooms after they get into cities. That’s nearly a third of its users – much more than expected for India’s stereotypically conservative travelers.
• 36 percent are business travelers. That high number may have to do with the uniformity of the experience. Among other things, Oyo promises wifi and a basic standard of quality for basics like bedding and bathrooms.
• Another 36 percent is made up of couples. Most couples traveled with Oyo to the romantic city of Jaipur – filled with history but not with too many affordable and modern hotels. Second was Gurgaon, a satellite city that’s a short drive away from Delhi.

He then listed some stats of guests that topped the charts for their Oyo usage. One traveler booked Oyo across 31 cities, and another stayed on for 183 days in a row, beating even Ritesh himself.

The highest number of total nights booked by a guest is 294.

A map of customers revealed that Oyo users were coming from all over India, as well as spots in countries like neighboring Bangladesh and Malaysia.

Many of them were booking while in transit. A photo from Ritesh’s slide showed a surge in bookings around Bangalore’s most clogged roads. That, in my opinion, is a great way to pass the time.

Collecting data has helped strengthen what Oyo offers to its travelers, Ritesh explained.

That means things like letting occupants choose whether they want their breakfast served to their rooms or in the conventional buffet style, and informing them when their internet packages are low.

It’s also helped them identify “feeder cities” – locations around popular destinations where travelers generally come from. These cities are then used to identify Oyo’s next markets.