PLANNING A VACATION? TRY HOME-STAYS INSTEAD OF BUDGET HOTELS
NEW DELHI: “Feel free to use any cutlery or crockery from our kitchen. You can use our fridge to chill your beverage and microwave to heat your food… Alcohol is not an issue as far as it’s responsibly handled. We live here as a family with our two kids and a pet (a friendly Great Dane),” reads the house description of Yogendra Vasupal, founder and CEO of accommodation aggregator Stayzilla.
Stayzilla is the second company in India offering home-stay options. San Francisco-based hospitality startup Airbnb, valued at around $25 billion, was one of the first movers in the space. It built a marketplace for people to list spare rooms, and allowed travellers to discover and book these accommodations from their desktops and smartphones.
From the warmth of a home to the comfort of a family, home-stays provide you a home away from home. Throw in the cost advantage — home-stays are 30% to 50% cheaper than a hotel — and you have a winner in your hands.
Staying at Vasupal’s place in Bangalore will cost you ₹945 per night. Hotel rates average ₹2,0002,500.
It’s a decade-old trend globally, which is now catching up in India.
“There are homes with unoccupied rooms, about a couple of million of them in the top 10 cities alone,” says Vasupal, who launched Stayzilla as a hotel aggregator in 2010.
In the 11 month since he started offering home-stays on its platform, Vasupal has seen its contribution go up from 6% to 40% in the overall revenue basket. “By December it will be 80%,” says Vasupal. The platform already has 33,000 rooms, and the company raised $13.5 million in January to expand the home-stay segment further.
On Stayzilla, a host can choose his guest — single or a couple, if you don’t want to host families with children, or even take in only vegetarians.
Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of OYO, has started OYO Homes, and like Vasupal has converted his 4BHK into a home-stay. “I have breakfast with the guest… The home owner is the host, but we standardise the property,” says the 22-years old entrepreneur.
There is no reception, but OYO offers Wi-fi, good toiletries, clean bedsheets, and proper checkin and check-out.
The Indian home-stay industry is very small, with just 60,000-70,000 rooms on offer. But it is expected to grow substantially. That’s why Airbnb, too, is betting big on India.
Airbnb has 17,000 homes listed on its platform in the country. During his visit to India couple of months ago, Nathan Blecharczyk, co-founder of Airbnb, told HT: “India has reached a critical mass... It has got momentum and this is the time to invest.”
A significant chunk of the $1.5 billion that Airbnb raised in December, it expected to come here.
The government, too, is in talks with home-stay aggregators to come out with new regulations and a rating mechanism. For now, aggregators visit the hotel, eyeball the property and put it online. A couple of months ago, aggregators, including Stayzilla, OYO and Airbnb, met tourism ministry officials and gave presentations.
Stayzilla and OYO signed Mous with the Uttarakhand government in July to promote home-stays. Stayzilla has signed another MOU with the Maharashtra government and is in talks with 10 more states.
Vasupal is bullish, and with a reason. Only 5% of a hotel’s revenue comes from aggregators, but in homestay it’s 100%. “In the next couple of years we hope to have half a million rooms offering home-stay on our platform,” he says.