Leave it to the Last Minute. You are in Good Company!
Startups like Zoomcar,
RoomsTonite gear up to meet needs of last-minute travellers
Procrastination, it turns out, is
enough of a national trait that it's the basis of business for a bunch of
startups.While Indians clearly aren't a nation of meticulous planners, they're
also loath to pay the high prices that last-minute purchases entail. Some
companies are trying to exploit this peculiarity .
RoomsTonite, a Bengalurubased
startup, provides a mobile application for last-minute hotel room bookings.
Using the app, customers can book rooms 48 hours before check-in (and not
before). Even so, rates offered through the app are said to be 4570% cheaper
than other sources--travel portals or the hotel itself. Officially launched in
January , the company has already aggregated rooms for more than 1,500 hotels
across 250 cities. It plans to have an inventory of 3,000 hotels by June end.
“Hotels on an average have only 60%
of their rooms occupied at any time. We partner with hotels to offer their
unsold rooms at deeply discounted rates,“ said founder and CEO Suresh John,
adding that the best rates are arrived at through a “complex set of
algorithms“. These are presented to the hotel. RoomsTonite evolved from IDS
Next, a provider of hotel inventory software.
Since its launch, the app has been
downloaded 50,000 times.The company has targeted 5 lakh downloads by the end of
this calendar year.
The idea itself isn't new--it was
the business model for Lastminute.com, set up by Lady LaneFox and Brent
Hoberman 17 years ago. But, after rising to heady levels at one time, the
company was valued at a much lower $120 million when it changed hands last
year.
However, the `on-demand' concept has
gained immense traction in India, especially after the launch of services by
taxi aggregator Uber. Similar homegrown services such as Ola followed. The
company recently said it booked two lakh rides in January and is growing at
30-40% a month.
On-demand transportation has gone
beyond taxi services. Zoomcar and Wicked Ride, both Bengaluru-based startups,
offer self-drive rentals on cars and luxury bikes, respectively.
“Indians are much savvier about what
they want than they were a few years ago. Where we differ from other self-drive
rentals is we offer you the vehicle anywhere you want, have the simplest,
paperless booking procedure, which makes things fast,“ said Greg Moran, CEO and
cofounder of Zoomcar.
The company started with a fleet of
seven cars and has since scaled it up to 1,000, including small cars, luxury
sedans and mid-level SUVs. It provides services in Bengaluru, Chennai, Pune,
Mumbai and Delhi and plans to launch in Hyderabad in a few weeks.
Wicked Ride, founded last year by
chartered accountant Vivekananda HR and two of his friends, rents out
motorcycles including Harley-Davidsons and Royal Enfields in Bengaluru. It
plans to launch in Pune this year with a fleet of 100 bikes.
In October, a group of graduates
from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, decided to exploit
the concept through a more localised model, choosing a household service that
was mundane but demands the best quality in double-quick time.
The result was MyWash, an online and
mobile application aggregating laundry services in Bengaluru.
“In our market study , we found an
amazing number of people who were sticklers for reliability and quality of
service when it came to laundry ,“ said co-founder Raghu Bharat, who called his
company “the Uber of laundry services“.
MyWash has a team of 80, which
includes 45 pickup and delivery boys. It has received 10,000 orders since its
October launch, half of them repeat customers. It plans to offer a service in
which clothes are picked up, washed and delivered in eight hours.The company is
considering a Mumbai launch next.
Most of these startups, including
Wicked Ride and MyWash, have received their first round of private equity
funding.
Some traditional operators have also
picked up on the last-minute demand frenzy.
Travel company Kuoni for instance
has Zero Planning holiday packages for those hit by a last-minute urge to take
a break. The company pre-books inventory and then allocates these to customers,
often alerting them through newsletters before a long weekend.
The packages invariably get sold,
said Kuoni CEO Vishal Suri.
“There is a sizeable market which
doesn't plan its holidays. This (Zero Planning) has been a profitable
exercise,“ he said.
The stress on last-minute deals has
ensured an increasing number of companies spend their energy on mobile
applications.
Travel portal Cleartrip for instance
provides specialised on-demand services such as pay@hotel and Quickeys for
last-minute hotel bookings through its mobile app.
Ola's mobile app bookings have
doubled in the last one year as a proportion of the total and now account for
80% of overall bookings
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Anirban Chowdhury
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Mumbai:
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ET9MAY15
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