Ritesh Agarwal0:04
See, I started the company when I had just gotten out of high school. At that time, I started doing internships at small companies — things like building websites, making social media pages — and I earned a little money from that. I was very fond of traveling, so I would take a bus from Anand Vihar ISBT and go wherever I could — Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Himachal. Accommodation there was always expensive, so I found small guest houses and holiday homes that generally people hadn't discovered. For ₹300, ₹500, ₹800, you could get a decent, clean place to stay. So my journey started from noticing that all these places were quite available but unknown in a way, and I began distributing them through a website — if you stayed in Uttarakhand, Himachal, Rajasthan, you'd find affordable places.
I ran that business for about a year. The biggest challenge was that you could get bookings done, but no one was taking responsibility for whether the service quality would be maintained. So I thought if this is the biggest problem, let me solve it. The first guest house that joined us in Gurugram — there was one in the South City area — I told the owner, 'I'll certify your property, improve the quality a bit so your occupancy increases. I'll take responsibility — every two or three days I'll come check and audit your property. For the first one or two months, I'll even be your front office manager — check-in, check-out, cleaning, I'll handle everything.' Their property's total occupancy was below 20%. They only got business during weddings. They said, 'I don't really trust you — occupancy hasn't increased in all this time, so how will it increase when you come?' But I said, 'The situation can't get worse than this. It can only get better. Give me the property for a few months and let me run it.'
Now, with that property, we did three things. First, I looked online at which budget properties appeared in top search rankings. I noticed their photos and interiors were good, so I replaced the white light with warm light and got a couple of paintings put up. The total cost for the room was maybe four to five thousand rupees, which I requested the owner to bear since he was investing in his own property — I didn't have anything at that point. I hadn't invested any money, but I put in the effort to figure out how to improve things. I introduced dynamic pricing. The hotel price used to be flat at ₹2,000 all year. I said, 'First, we'll sell at ₹999.' You may have heard when 999 started — we announced a starting rate of ₹999. After the first three rooms sold at ₹999, I'd increase the price by ₹100-150 per room. Once volume picks up, you can sort hotels on the internet by popularity, quality, or price. My strategy was to first sort by price, get three bookings in, which would then push us into top ranking by popularity, and then we could charge more. Plus, if someone stayed at ₹999 and got ₹2,000 worth of value, they'd leave good reviews, which would also help us climb to the top faster in review rankings.
So just from this, I started the first hotel, and by the end of the first month, Yadav ji's property had reached over 90% occupancy.
