Q. There are a lot of start-ups in the hospitality space. How are you different from the rest?
A. This space is getting a lot of attention right now but there is acute difference in how various players are approaching the problems. The core problem that we are trying to solve is poor quality that is currently available in budget hotels. The problem that we are solving is not that of online booking alone, which is what I think many of the other players are focusing on. We partner with existing hotels which are in our target price range of Rs 1,000-3,000, and help them improve their operations effectiveness. We help them improve their quality by training their staff members, by sharing our standard operating procedure with them, by giving them a technological solution, and so on and so forth. And then, we market them under our Treebo brand. So, once they partner with us, they become a Treebo hotel. The big difference between us and some of the other players is that we will not work on a part inventory basis. We are not an aggregator – we are a budget hotel brand. So, we will not take 4-5 rooms in various properties and sell them under our brand name. We will take the full hotel as we believe that's the only way to have the enough control on the full experience of the property, rather than taking a few rooms, in which case, the property owner would perceive us as just another booking agent rather than the brand. Ours is a franchise model basically, we don't own or operate the assets but other than that we have the deep involvement in making sure that the hotel deliver the quality experience.
Q. The budget and economy segment is largely unorganised. What made you come into this sector?
A. Precisely that is the reason why we came into this space. Because the space has been unorganised for such a long time, and it continues to be unorganised or fragmented. This is exactly the reason why customers are not able to get a quality experience when they stay at these hotels because unless and until you bring in certain professionalism in how you run the business, bring in professional expertise in all areas including operations and marketing, you will never really be able to offer a great expertise to the customers. So, when we looked at the problem, we realised although the problem of online booking has been solved, it still doesn't solve the quality problem. If you log onto an online portal, there are thousands of hotels on the website, but how do you know which one to stay at. And even if you choose you where you want to stay, you have no assurance of the kind of experience you are going to get over there. The reason for that is each one of these are mom-and-pop hotels working in a standalone manner, and even unorganised manner. So, when we come in, we bring in a certain sense of professionalism to understand what it takes to give a quality experience to the customer and that's what we train the staff of the hotel on. The staff do not belong to us. They are owner's staff as we don't own these assets or we don't operate these hotels ourselves. Our involvement is in terms of training staff members, conducting daily quality audits and inspections, providing right technology to use and finally, bringing this hotel under our brand. Since it is a franchise model and we are confident that we are adding a lot of value to our customers, now a customer can come to one of our hotels and need not worry about the kind of experience he will get because we are kind of responsible for that. We are taking care of that, and not just limiting ourselves to online booking which many others are doing.
Q. What kind of a property in terms of room counts would interest you?
A. Number of rooms actually varies. We have properties as small as 10 rooms to properties as large as 80 rooms. The range is wide but typical size of property would be 25-30 odd rooms.
Q. What is your current inventory and what is the target by the fiscal-end?
A. We have an inventory of 1000-plus rooms in eight cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Mysore, Jaipur, Hyderabad, Chennai and Goa. That translates into 30-35 odd hotels. By end of this fiscal, we will get about 3000-3500 rooms. So, we will triple in size and will be present in 15-20 cities. We will be launching soon in Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Indore, Patna and Chandigarh later this year or early next year.
Q. You have raised $6 million in June from Matrix and SAIF Partners. Are you sufficiently placed or are you planning to raise more funds?
A. We launched the business only in June. Ours is probably the fastest series A that any start-up has done so far. So we are very well capitalised and its only three months since we raised that money and we are not looking to raise any funds right now. We will raise whenever we need next, but as of now, we are very well capitalised.
Q. How you are utilising it?
A. It is going essentially into four things. We are building a top class team. We already have about 75 people in the team and this number will go up to 200 by the end of the fiscal. Secondly, as we expand to more cities, add more hotels, we require money. Third, we are building a terrific technology product, as it is a key part of everything that we do. So, we are investing a lot of money in building that technology as well. Fourth is marketing, in which we will start deploying funds now.
