• Trick is to get more things right than the mistakes you make. You need to put in place the process to avoid repeating the same mistake.

• India

  • Top 30M: Top credit card users , Oyo came here later.
  • Next 100M: Those who make enough, but don't live the exorbitant life. Oyo targeted this group at first.

  Seving Bharat

  Fundamentally serving the mass market is critical to create a large impact.

  

  More than 90% of this market requires serious tech and product interventions.

  Insights from hotel owner

  • Most of the times we have an assumption that suppliers in your business ( hotel owners, farmers etc. ) are not technically savvy. But if drivers can adopt, why not hotel receptionists?

  • I see technology as something like an additional task for me because I have other things to do.

    • For this, they have a vision of creating the OYO operating system which helps them run the business end to end. Each part of this system is intelligent and provides insights to hotel owners about the decisions that need to be taken. This is done based on data across hotel owners + customer's past hotel visits.

  

  • They observed that their customer is hotel owner rather than manager. So by co-Oyo app, they created a realtime P&L.

    

• Never come to the conclusion that your TG is not customer savvy. Everyone has their wants and needs. People come and say that "this is how tech has been used in our industry", never rely on that even though you use it as a data point. Always focus on how you can make their life better.

Issues with hotel owners

• Reconciliation Statement : its either not transparent enough or not detailed enough

  • Oyo went to each partner and asked how their CA explains statements to them. They redesigned the software in that way.

• Need support for reducing the cost while improving the service

  • Got local partners for fast and better fullfillment.

• Hotel owners care the most about the price but they care way more about earnings.

  • Mindset: if this room does not sell for 2000 rupees, I'll rather keep it empty.
  • Oyo had to educate hotel owners to avoid this mindset.
    • AI based dynamic pricing
      • For eg. prices rise when a train comes in, then drops by 4-5% after that.
    • Oyo may not be always able to guess and vary as per local events. So even though they don't allow hotel owners to change prices, they gave a little bit of flexibility of changing prices by 3-4%. IF hotel owners changed and improved rev, Oyo gave them a further incentive. If they hurt their rev, Oyo reduced flexibility. This reduced their pricing complaints by 20%.

Customer Issues

• Hotel staff is mostly from villages, but they are always curious to learn. Training low-skilled or semi-skilled talent in India by a combination of online and on-the-job training.

• Oyo has a lot of bite sized videos to help hotel owners solve their problems. This integrates with the Oyo OS. If hotel is facing wifi problems, a video related to the same pops up.
• They have Also found that buddy-up training is the best way of training. They link the success of one training to the next. This has improved their CTR.