मैगज़्टर गोल्ड के साथ असीमित हो जाओ

मैगज़्टर गोल्ड के साथ असीमित हो जाओ

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कोशिश गोल्ड - मुक्त

The Conversation RITESH AGARWAL

Fortune India

|

July 2021

SoftBank-backed hotels aggregator OYO, currently valued at over $9 billion, was hit hard by the pandemic last year. Since then, it has managed to focus on improvements in technology and user experience and get back on the road to recovery. Founder and group CEO Ritesh Agarwal, 27, at the forefront of reimagining OYO for a post-pandemic future, explains how he has been crafting this strategy.

- SOURAV MAJUMDAR

The Conversation RITESH AGARWAL

THE PANDEMIC IMPACT

Tell us how the pandemic impacted your business, and the things you did to bring the graph back again into the positive.

I will break this answer up into two parts. First, the impact of Covid-19 and how we first responded and stabilised our ship, and second, how we are working towards resurgence and growing in the future. The pandemic impacted us for the first time in March and April 2020, when our gross margin in dollars fell over 66%. 1 That was something that we’d built over a long period of time and that dropped substantially. Our perspective was that whenever there is an impact of such a crisis, there should be a simple way for everybody to understand how to deal with it. We thought the way to deal with the crisis was going to be care, cash, and evolution.

Let me start with cash. Within cash, our company worked on ensuring we speak to customers and owners so that we can protect and recover whatever revenue we can. So we learnt that there were four or five types of customer trends that were going on. Staycations were growing. We doubled down and ensured that our entire marketing, products, and supply were designed towards staycations. The second is, we saw there was a rise in work from anywhere. We prepared work from anywhere to be our focussed concept. We saw a big shift to online from offline, so we doubled down on digital-based reservations. We saw that value for money was critical. We saw healthcare and sanitation were critical, and we made sure we had [initiatives like] ‘Sanitised Before Your Eyes’, where people can see their rooms being sanitised before them. And recently, [we launched] VaccinAid, 2 which are hotels where the entire staff has been vaccinated. And these hotels have seen much higher revenue. These are things we did to ensure the revenue was focussed.

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