Kahini Chakraborty – Mumbai
Launched in 2014, RoomsTonite, a mobile app in India aimed at last-minute hotel booking, is looking to expand its inventory to over 1500 hotels by March 2015. Currently, the company has about 600 hotels signed in more than 100 destinations in India. Speaking to Express TravelWorld, Suresh John, founder and CEO, RoomsTonite said, “Being a last minute travel service, to ensure guaranteed reservation, we have established real-time connectivity with majority of the hotels’ reservation system and handled other technology integrations. We have grown manifold in this short time span. Going forward, we are aiming to expand our presence to over 1500 hotels by March 2015. We are signing up hotels in new destinations, and also increasing our hotel base in existing destinations.” RoomsTonite has a real-time integration with a hotel’s booking system that eliminates the chances of human error in the (last-minute) reservation process. At the same time it is a cost-effective way for hotels to sell their unsold rooms and earn additional revenue.
A self-funded venture, the company will be investing heavily into its mobile app to provide customers’ the ease of hotel booking experience. “We also constantly roll out new features to the tools that our hotel partners use. To ensure a guaranteed reservation for our customers at last minute, we have established a direct connect with most of our hotel partners’ reservation systems. Now, when a customer reserves a hotel room in RoomsTonite, the booking is immediately pushed to the hotel’s reservation system thereby ensuring a ‘no-hiccups’ scenario for both customers and hotels,” informed John.
Elaborating on the growth of the online hotel booking psyche of Indians, he opined, “Indians have become more tech savvy nowadays with a majority opting for online hotel booking these days. This is a complete turnaround from earlier days when offline was the preferred mode for the most. India is currently one of the fastest growing markets in the Asia-Pacific region. Also, customer’s booking window (lead time to a booking) has changed, there has been an increase in the number of impulsive travellers. We want to leverage all above trends to set a strong foothold and become the market leaders in last minute hotel booking.”