New Delhi (CNN Business) India’s biggest hotel chain is targeting global domination.
OYO, which launched just five years ago as a platform to book budget hotels in India, says it’s adding rooms faster than the world’s top three hotel chains combined.
“By 2023 we want to be the largest and most preferred hotel chain in the world,” an OYO spokesperson told CNN.
Headquartered in Gurgaon, a tech city on the outskirts of Delhi, the company now owns or franchises hotels in global cities including London, Beijing, Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur.
It operates nearly 9,000 hotels with 170,000 rooms across India. Including its international business, it offers 460,000 rooms in eight countries.
OYO currently has almost half a million hotel rooms worldwide.
That still leaves it trailing way behind global market leader Marriott (MAR), which had about 1.3 million rooms worldwide as of September 2018.
But the startup is growing at a staggering pace. It went from 6 million room bookings in 2016 to 75 million by the end of 2018.
It has also got the attention — and the money — of high-profile investors such as SoftBank, the Japanese tech giant that has bet on Uber, WeWork, Slack and some of India’s biggest startups.
SoftBank (SFTBF) has poured millions of dollars into OYO, largely from the huge Vision Fund it launched with Saudi Arabia.
The fund led OYO’s most recent investment round, which raised $1 billion and valued the company at $5 billion.
OYO has used much of that cash to fuel its global expansion, rolling out its app and signing up hotels in the United Kingdom and Indonesia last year and the Philippines earlier this year. The company also offersproperties in Malaysia, Nepal and the United Arab Emirates.
It claims to be one of the top five hospitality chains in China, where it launched in 2017 and now has more than 5,000 hotels across 280 cities.
[Source: “Indian hotel startup OYO is planning to be bigger than Marriott” published by CNN Business / CNN.com]Photo Credits: CNN Business / CNN.com
