An Interview with Rohit Khetrapal and Simran Sial, Co-Founders Of Find MyStay

The Indian travel market is projected to grow at 18 per cent in 2013 to reach $23.2 billion, according to a report from PhocusWright. Online travel in India continues to outpace the total travel market, with online gross bookings projected to reach USD 12.5 billion in 2015, up 80 per cent over 2012.

Today there are Online Travel Agents like MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Cleartrip and others that offer an array of travel bookings like flights, hotels and holiday packages. However, niche portals that offer only one of the service like only hotel booking are mushrooming lately. A MakeMyTrip survey last year revealed that 97 per cent Indians prefer booking a hotel online while 77 per cent have already booked a hotel online through an Online Travel Agent (OTA).  Portals like StayZilla, Hotel.com, RushGate, Groupon and others are becoming gradually popular. FindMyStay is a new entry in online hotel bookings market that offers users a unique way to choose their hotels. We spoke to the Co-founders Simran Sial and Rohit Khetrapal about their mew venture and future plans.

Here is the excerpts from an e-mail interview with the duo.

1. There were reports in last December that you were looking for a funding to expand internationally. Did you receive the funding? Also, what is your workforce as of now and do you plan to add more people to your team?

We plan to hire more people in technology, product, hotel relations and customer service. In case of the funding, we have just began the dialogue with some VC’s and its too early to comment.

2.How has been the traffic to the website since its launch? Can you share the total number of bookings on the platform till date?

The website is witnessing a good combination of unique and referral traffic for some time now. Even though we have done little on the marketing front, word of mouth is doing really well for us. In the last quarter we have done close to 750 room nights out of which majority has come in the last month which testifies the growing interest of audience. We are 5 months old. First 2 months was just the launch with no marketing or awareness. We are getting about 1000 visitors daily out of which 200 are unique visitors.

3. How is FindMyStay different from other OTA players in the market?

We launched our portal with a unique, first of its kind product in India, Find My Stay@ My Price, which allows customers to bid lower and save more money on their hotel stay than on any other travel portal. So instead of hotel offering his best discount and price, the customer chooses the best price and discount he wants over and above the best discount online.

4. Can you tell us about your revenue model?

It is simple and same as any travel website, commission on hotel booking. Since the launch, our revenues have touched Rs 50 lakh.

5. Please explain the ‘Reverse Online Auctioning’ process of the portal.

For starters, customer selects the location and travel dates along with their category preference for hotel rooms. Then our system shows an average of best available hotels rates of the chosen star category at his preferred location. The customer bids against an average of best hotel rates of his chosen star category in the selected location. So if the average price is Rs. 5000, he bids lower. This is reverse auction. In the process, customer saves more money than he would have on any other website as he is negotiating with the hotels through our platform

6. How many hotels have you tied up with? Do you plan to add more?

We have an inventory of approx. 10000 hotels and we are in the process of adding more.

7. What are the challenges in this field?

The biggest challenge so far has been explaining a new concept like reverse auctioning of hotel rooms to our partners and customers. It is sometimes challenging to sell this new concept and explain how travelers can save more money by using Find My Stay @ My Price over the already discounted prices offered on leading online portals. But having said that, once a customer experiences the product, he is likely to remain loyal to us because of the money we save for him on his hotel stay and we are witnessing the same

8. Tell us something about the recent UI redesign? 

We wanted the user to browse the site easily without any complexities and hence we tweaked the UI of the website. The new user-friendly interface offers ease of navigation, unique features and wider options to choose from, thereby guaranteeing a quick and hassle free hotel booking process. A unique split screen display allows for a faster and quicker comparison of hotels thereby streamlining the entire selection process.

9. How do you define the current OTA market in India? 

The market is expanding exponentially specially in case of hotels with more and more people looking to book online and on the mobile. It is cluttered, not because there is no room for a new player, but because nobody is differentiating its product and services. With our bidding model, we aim to clearly stand out in the clutter and make a market for ourselves.

10. What are your plans for the year 2014?

Targeting both leisure and business travelers, we plan to launch international inventory, regular look and book offering and a mobile site soon. We also plan to introduce more innovative products in the near future which are at a confidential development stage. We have already launched B2B business solutions initiatives for corporates wherein we allocate a single-point resource for every client company in the form of an account manager who will be responsible for all bookings for that company.  We envision making the hotel booking process simpler by focusing on the customer’s user experience and by providing real value to them while being a catalyst in the business growth of our hotel partners.

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