 "Find My Stay to raise up to $8 mn for overseas expansion")
Find My Stay, a New Delhi-based start-up that operates a hotel booking website with the same name, is planning to raise a capital of $5-8 million to launch international inventory and roll out more vanilla offerings during the next calendar year.
“Our idea is to introduce the regular ‘search and booking’ service in the domestic market towards early 2014 and then focus on launching an international inventory by the end of next year,” Rohit Kheterpal, co-founder of Find My Stay, said.
Self-funded by Kheterpal and another co-founder Simran Sial, the one-year-old company offers ‘Find My Stay @ My Price’ service. This allows users to book a hotel at exactly the price they wish to pay for their stay through an online bidding (or reverse auction).
Findmystay.com has arrangements with more than 10,000 hotels in India, offering a room inventory of close to 200,000, including service apartments and guest houses.
“We are in talks with various partners and wholesalers globally to offer more than 100,000 hotels targeting both leisure and business travellers,” Kheterpal said, adding the company was working on a mobile application, which should be ready for commercial launch in the next 3-4 months.
Stating that travel booking as a market in India was very fragmented, with a majority of the bookings still being made through the traditional offline mode (agents), he said the Indian online hotel booking market, currently pegged at $1 billion, was seeing a huge traction since the last couple of years, registering a growth of over 50 per cent each year.
“Our idea is to introduce the regular ‘search and booking’ service in the domestic market towards early 2014 and then focus on launching an international inventory by the end of next year,” Rohit Kheterpal, co-founder of Find My Stay, said.
Self-funded by Kheterpal and another co-founder Simran Sial, the one-year-old company offers ‘Find My Stay @ My Price’ service. This allows users to book a hotel at exactly the price they wish to pay for their stay through an online bidding (or reverse auction).
Findmystay.com has arrangements with more than 10,000 hotels in India, offering a room inventory of close to 200,000, including service apartments and guest houses.
“We are in talks with various partners and wholesalers globally to offer more than 100,000 hotels targeting both leisure and business travellers,” Kheterpal said, adding the company was working on a mobile application, which should be ready for commercial launch in the next 3-4 months.
Stating that travel booking as a market in India was very fragmented, with a majority of the bookings still being made through the traditional offline mode (agents), he said the Indian online hotel booking market, currently pegged at $1 billion, was seeing a huge traction since the last couple of years, registering a growth of over 50 per cent each year.