Oyo launches Townhouse to cater to premium mid-market segment

Today, budget hotel brand OYO announced that it has launched Townhouse, which focuses on higher quality and better value and caters to the premium mid-market segment. Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO of OYO, also excitedly put up a post on Facebook, sharing a sneak-peek of the images of the Townhouse properties.

There will be over 250 categories and more than 10,000 rooms across 12 cities that will be a part of OYO Townhouse Properties. The focus will be on delivering quality service.

In 2016, OYO had focused on strengthening their leadership team, launched OYO Captain (a personalised concierge service for budget hotels), opened new offices, raised funding of $90 million from Softbank, and even admitted that it has a lot to learn and improve on. OYO also launched a "relationship mode" on its app.

Speaking on Relationship Mode, Kavikrut, Chief Growth Officer of OYO, says that, over the course of time, as they analysed guest feedback, they found that couples were likely to face inconvenience at the last minute, on account of hotel policies not being communicated to them earlier.

OYO Rooms had shared a report in May last year that said the company had reached unit-level profitability, meaning that, on an average, OYO makes a profit on every room sold. As of May this year, the average booking rates of the rooms range from Rs 1,400 to 1,800. Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO of OYO, says that their team has delivered a fifteenfold year-on-year growth, with 2.3 million booked room-night transactions in the first quarter of 2016.

The launch of Townhouse this year marks OYO’s push towards a better customer service experience. Over the past year, the company has begun to face stiff competition from other brands like Treebo Hotels, Zip Rooms, Stayzilla and even Paytm, which entered the last-minute hotel booking space.

The focus of most of these budget hotel spaces has shifted from solely pricing towards customer experience and overall customer service.