MakeMyTrip, Yatra and Go ibibo to partner with Oyo to boost their business
Collaboration brings bigger gains than competition, and the leading players in the domestic online travel space seem to have understood this. When in October 2015, MakeMyTrip, Goibibo and Yatra jointly decided to de-list budding budget hotel room aggregator Oyo from their platforms, the stage was set for an Oyo versus OTAs (online travel agencies) showdown. Oyo, however, decided to ignore this unfair practice, which could well have become a matter of investigation at the Competition Commission of India. Instead, it turned its focus on improving its business proposition and expanding its reach. The hotel aggregator moved from a simple distributor model — where it sold some of the inventory of a hotel as Oyo Rooms, while the hotel sold individually on OTAs — to an exclusive model where all rooms were Oyo-branded. That helped it have better control on the systems and processes at the partner hotels.The growing scale of Oyo made Cyrus Mistry, former chairman of Indian Hotels Company, which runs the Taj group of hotels, refer to the startup as a ‘threat’.