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Mangrove Capital-backed budget accommodation aggregator, Wudstay.com, has acquired offline budget hotel aggregator, Awsome Stays, in an all cash-and-stock deal.
The amount of acquisition has been left undisclosed.
The acquisition will help Wudstay expand into six new cities including Varanasi, Goa, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Dehradun and Pune. With this, Awesome Stays’ employees including its CEO, Deepak Sharma, will now join the WudStay team.
Wudstay, which started its operations in April this year had raised $3 Mn from Mangrove Capital Partners and Vikas Saxena, CEO of Nimbuzz. The startup claims to have a strong presence in Gurgaon, Manali, Delhi, Corbett, Haridwar and Jaipur wherein the company has clocked over 3000 nights just month.
The startup has tied up with about 40 guest houses and hotels in Gurgaon and Jaipur which are available at an affordable cost of INR 999 to INR 1,299.
According to Prafulla, Indian travel market will hit about $70-75 Bn in 2015. Wudstay is gearing up to tap this huge market. He added, “The acquisition comes at a time when Wudstay is aggressively looking at expanding its network across cities. Wudstay, which recently embarked on its journey to become the Gold Standard for budget hotels will expand to 65 new cities in the next 18 months. Deepak has been running Awesome Stays for 2 years and his experience will help us a lot.”
Awesome Stays, which started in 2014 by Deepak Sharma and Pankaj Singh, took bookings only over the phone. The firm was getting close to 6,000 orders per month.
Deepak Sharma, Founder & CEO of Awesome Stays, said that acquisition of Awesome Stays reiterates its strong network and forte in providing experiential travel stay to its customers. “ WudStay is growing at a tremendous speed with a focus on quality assurance which makes it the right player for disrupting budget hotel accommodation industry.”
The budget hotel marketplace which is already cluttered with players like ZenRooms, Treebo, FabHotels, ZoRooms, Oyo Rooms and Stayzilla is competing against each other to establish a strong foothold in the market.
Wudstay’s USP lies in having a seamless booking with tech enabled booking engine that ensures that all the standards guaranteed to the customers are followed by the accommodation partners.
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