
A 24-Year-Old Built a $5B Hotel Startup in Five Years - dhruvarora013
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-25/this-24-year-old-built-a-5-billion-hotel-startup-in-five-years?srnd=technology-vp
======
sn41
As a customer, I find OYO hotels to be very bad. There are hotels that I
otherwise would not even have gone to (since low end hotels in India are
appallingly filthy), but the OYO label lends them greater credibility.

I avoid OYO when I can.

A general thumb rule I follow for booking hotels in India is : if you are
staying with family, go for hotels priced around or more than 40-50% of the
price of the top end chain hotels in that city. For example, in Delhi, try not
to book any hotel priced below Rs. 3500 per night. Chances are high that it
may be cockroach-infested and grimy. Many of these now have the dreaded OYO
label attached to them.

~~~
balladeer
TripAdvisor ratings are very indicative and the portal usually shows prices
from various booking sites. Then I call the hotel directly and 90% of time I
get a better price and a room of choice guaranteed right them which is not at
all possible over booking sites where you get a room type and get assigned one
when you check-in. Definitely direct booking when the property is on AirBnb -
in this case almost always owners themselves ask me to book directly with them
and bypass AirBnb.

You are bang on about the cost threshold.

Pro-tip: for real hotel locations use Google Maps in satellite mode. Esp.
useful in hill stations and beaches - you'll avoid hotels that claim to have a
view but forget to mention it's the bus-stand view.

~~~
babaganoosh89
How much can you get off by calling hotels? Maybe 10-20% off Expedia prices?

~~~
balladeer
Yatra, Booking, and Agoda are what I usually check. Yes, around 10-25% I’d say
and usually the discussed price (over phone) is final i.e no additional taxes
unlike on portals where after you go for checkout tax will be extra, sometimes
other myriad of fees.

On rare occasions I have been actually told to book from booking sites as they
won’t be able to offer better prices :-)

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bsder
It's a franchise system.

Franchises are wonderful when you are in _expansion_ phase--especially if you
have a nicely banked war chest (which this company does because of the VC
backing).

The test of a franchise is when it is in stable or contraction phase.

That's when you find out if it's a business or a pyramid scheme.

------
gniv
As an anecdote, this happened at an Oyo hotel:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhubCtp-
DI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhubCtp-DI)

TL;DW: Western woman was trapped in the room by hotel employees threatening
sexual assault.

------
thisisit
I first heard about OYO through a friend who shared this livemint article:

[https://www.livemint.com/Companies/7CN7u5d4i3bfYgBAZLdLpM/Wi...](https://www.livemint.com/Companies/7CN7u5d4i3bfYgBAZLdLpM/Will-
the-real-Ritesh-Agarwal-please-stand-up.html)

The article paints a terrible picture of a guy who has embraced the - fake it,
till you make it mantra. Lied about Thiel scholarship, best selling books and
even screwing his partners.

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billfruit
OYO has made convenient finding hotels and making confirmed reservations in
hotels in small town india. Also since all payments are billed by OYO and not
the hotel, the hotel cannot fleece you like charging more for a foreign
national. They also have a convenient functional app.

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peter303
And his surname is not Patels. :-) The Patel clan own a lot of the Mom and Pop
hotels in the US.

~~~
hangonhn
Is there a reason why? I knew someone growing up whose family owned a motel in
our hometown and her family name was Patel too.

~~~
DanBC
This submission talks about it:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17915049)

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QuanSai
I'm so tired of seeing articles like this. WHO CARES? Nothing about this story
is repeatable. It deludes the masses in terms of real prospects of starting a
business. The headline alone is just clickbait. It's completely unfair, as it
robs desperate people of a reality check. I wish I could downvote this.

~~~
beautybasics
Lot people find this usedful.

\- They are solving problem differently

\- 24 year old scaled a company to $5 billion value

And of course you can downvote.

~~~
cobalt
you can only downvote with enough karma/rep/whatever it is here

~~~
dEnigma
Plus, you can't downvote submissions at all, even if you have the 500 karma
necessary to downvote comments. The only thing you can do is to flag it.

~~~
wolco
or ignore and move on to the next article.

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shnaja
Another story glorifying a sociopath!

Article on Oyo founder (Ritesh) from 2015 -
[https://www.livemint.com/Companies/7CN7u5d4i3bfYgBAZLdLpM/Wi...](https://www.livemint.com/Companies/7CN7u5d4i3bfYgBAZLdLpM/Will-
the-real-Ritesh-Agarwal-please-stand-up.html)

------
TuGuQuKu
Imagine if we lived in a society where these stories were about _housing_
startups, not hotel startups. Food production startups instead of food
packaging startups. Public infrastructure projects instead of scooter renting
apps. Actual creation of wealth and value added to the economy instead of
endless insipid rent-seeking, shuffling value around from middleman to
middleman until one of them figures out a more efficient way to extract.

~~~
tcbawo
Some people look at societal improvements as byproducts of increased wealth
generation. In other words, me getting rich is good for the world, presuming I
am not cheating/robbing someone else in the process. Although, apparently
that's an optional ethical boundary for some.

~~~
Boxbot
Wealth generation is not wealth distribution. It is entirely possible for you
to become very, very rich thru wealth distribution resulting from processes
that retard wealth generation or reduce wealth globally.

Actually generating wealth is hard, it's so much easier to inject yourself
into existing transactions and take a cut instead.

