OYO announces strategic partnership with Spain's Hotelbeds

Gurugram-based hospitality startup OYO Hotels and Homes has announced a partnership with Spain-headquartered bedbank, Hotelbeds, on Monday. As a result of the contract, OYO will be able to distribute its hotel rooms via Hotelbed's wholesale channel and Bedsonline's retail travel agent channel. Hotelbeds will also be able to have access to OYO's Hotels and Homes across ten countries.

OYO currently has more than 18,000 franchised and leased hotels, and over 10,000 homes and villas in India, China, Malaysia, Nepal, UK, UAE, Indonesia, Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Japan.

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Maninder Gulati, Chief Strategy Office at OYO Hotels and Homes, said in a press release:

"At OYO, our mission is to create a perfect space in every place by ensuring the best possible experience for our guests, and having Hotelbeds as a strategic global partner supports this vision. Hotelbeds distribution channel of B2B travel buyers helps us access new customer segments and geographies. The bedbank company's cost-efficient distribution channel makes them an ideal partner to achieve our goal."

This is the first time OYO has partnered with a bedbank. The partnership will provide OYO the access to Hotelbeds' more than 60,000 travel buying intermediaries, including tour operators, airline websites, points redemption programs, loyalty plans.

Mark Redmond, Head of Global Chains at Hotbeds said, "We are very pleased to be first travel distributor (of OYO Hotels and Homes) given the privilege to work with them. While they currently have an impressive 5,15,000 rooms, they're set to increase up to one million by the end of the year, and we're looking forward to helping them find incremental and higher-yielding bookings for many of those rooms."

In October last year, Hotelbeds had announced the consolidation of all its brands in the wholesale channel - GTA, Tourico Holidays, and Hotelbeds - under the name of Hotelbeds. Recently, in February, the wholesale brand also announced that 90 percent of its hotel partners will now have access to all the travel buying intermediaries.

OYO is backed by SoftBank, Sequoia India, Lightspeed India, Hero Enterprise, and China Lodging Group. At the beginning of this month, Airbnb confirmed investing in OYO's Series E round. The hospitality startup raised $1 billion in its Series E round.

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