We want to maintain a balance between growth and profitability, says Jasveer Singh of QiK Stay

Hotel aggregation space is getting a bit crowded. How are you differentiating your product? Many of the hotel aggregators are taking their revenue model beyond just listing. What additional services are you offering to hotels?

We have a very different target market; unlike most of our competitors who are serving the lower-end of the budget hotel market, we are catering to the higher-end segment of this budget hotel market. Our average room night price is about Rs 2500-3000.

We're not here to fight a price war. Because I come from a hospitality background, as do all of our departmental heads and operations and sales employees, I know that the key to customer retention in this domain is not cashbacks or 100% discounts or Rs 399 or any other lower price tags. If you can satisfy the customers in terms of service and quality, the customer could be yours forever. So, we handpick only those hotels that tick all the right boxes in our checklist. We are following the concept of co-branding, and not mere aggregation.

What are your expansion plans going forward?

We have been expanding our footprint for the past six months. We currently have our presence in 80 cities across the country and have over 400 hotels under our ambit, covering all the major corporate, commercial, tourist and pilgrimage destinations. We plan to add another 800 hotels and be present in another 50 cities by the end of this calendar year.

We have seen many start-ups looking at business optimisation and cost rationalisation to reach profitability. Are you also looking to achieve breakeven, or you would much rather look at scaling up?

Our focus is to maintain a balance between growth and profitability. The way start-ups are splashing unnecessary discounts for short-term benefits is not sustainable in the long run. This is where we are very clear on not starting a price war, but providing quality experience and customer satisfaction so that our customers would want to come to us again in future.

How do you see the hotel aggregation space shaping out? How are the business and revenue models evolving in the segment?

We see that a lot of competitors have entered this space over the past one year and it would not be a surprise if a few more come up, such is the potential of this market. However, a lot of these firms have now realised that quality and customer satisfaction is the way to survive in this market, not short-term gains by burning cash on unnecessary discounts. Therefore, solving customer issues and providing them with quality service and memorable experiences is how this segment is poised to evolve in the future.

What prompted you to enter this segment?

I was once looking for a paying guest (PG) accommodation in Gurgaon and had a very tough time finding a decent PG for myself. This motivated me to start something that would solve this problem of finding quality PGs easily. This led to the starting up of sparehousing.com, an online review and comparison portal for PG properties. I worked on this idea before making a successful exit from the company to start something more profitable and scalable in this space. During this time, while I was staying at a guesthouse, the business model of guesthouses caught my attention and eventually, I started a guesthouse of my own in Gurgaon, and called it ZoZo Inn. Gradually, I started more such guesthouses and made them profitable over time. After a few months, I realised that although this business is profitable, but owning guesthouses can't be a scalable business. This led to the inception of my next venture, called ZoZo Stay, an asset-light model for budget hotels available on hourly basis, which would multiply the revenue of these hotels and cut down costs for the customers significantly. It turned out, the Indian market wasn't ready for this concept yet, so I pivoted the idea to create a chain of co-branded premium budget hotels and launched QiK Stay.

How have you been funded till now and how much more do you plan to raise and how?

We had raised an amount of $2,50,000 in October last year. Now we are planning to raise Series A round of funding and are in advanced talks with several investors for the same.