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Gurgaon-based online hotel aggregator OYO Rooms has tied up with NYSE-listed travel platform Travelport. The deal will help Travelport’s users book hotels from the 6,000 hotel properties of OYO.
Founded by Ritesh Agarwal in 2013, OYO Rooms is an online platform to book hotel rooms, nearby restaurants and cab services. It currently operates in over 180 Indian cities and started its operations in Malaysia in January 2016.
Travelport’s travel commerce platform connects hotel providers and independent properties to its 68,000 agencies worldwide. It connects travel providers with online and offline travel buyers in a proprietary business-to-business (B2B) travel marketplace.
UK-based Travelport offers 650,000 hotel properties across 180 countries, 400 airlines and 36,000 car rental locations worldwide.
In May 2016, OYO rooms expanded its services to the northeast, and offered 250 rooms in Darjeeling and Gangtok.
Niklas Andreen, senior vice president of hospitality, Travelport said, “This is an exciting partnership and one that forms part of our ongoing strategy to extend our hotel offerings. Our industry-leading connectivity enables us to directly acquire specific hotel content, as well as requested local hotel chains and individual properties, and we are looking forward to continuing to expand our offerings in this area throughout the year.”
In April 2016, Oyo Rooms raised over $100 Mn in its fifth funding round led by Japan’s SoftBank, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, Greenoaks Capital and existing investors.
Prior to this in December 2015, reports emerged that OYO Rooms was set to acquire Zo Rooms. Later in February 2016, Zo Rooms shut its website, fueling the rumours. However, there were negotiations about the anticipated deal, and following this, SoftBank finally made a disclosure in its earning report in April 2016 about the OYO Rooms and Zo deal and had confirmed the acquisition.
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