A4A keen to grow hotel booking numbers

Delhi based A4A Hospitality is planning to tie up with a media partner for promoting their portal and in turn, boost its hotels reservation business.

The company's recently-launched web portal was a hotel booking engine working on an extensive database of over 3000 hotels in 300 cities and small towns across the country.

More than 50 per cent of the list comprised budget hotels, as well as luxury hotels, business hotels, and resorts, said Ashwani Sagar Dhawan, president and chief executive officer, A4A Hospitality.

A4A had tried to develop its portal with an investment of $ 1.5 million phased out over 18 months, he added.

A4A Hospitality was looking at developing a revenue sharing model with a media organization in print and audio-visual to improve visibility of services.

Currently, the company booked 500 to 700 hotel reservations through its voice support system. It had customer service centers at all leading metros, and was planning a national call-center at Gurgaon.

Launching a website was a natural extension of the hotel marketing business.

More than 5000 hits were expected per day on a website like this one, and conversion rate to actual bookings was around 10-20 per cent, he explained. There were nearly 83,000 hotel search engines in the country, but booking engines numbered only a few thousand. The market was dominated by players like makemytrip, yatra, and travelguru.

As a new entrant, A4A aimed to offer multi-specialty services, starting with airline bookings, and eventually diversify to include lifestyle products, explained Dhawan.

Around 40 per cent of all online bookings on sites would be for hotels and rest would be for airline tickets, he added.

The company would arrange backup support for every customer.

If a visitor to the website failed to secure a hotel booking, the voice service would ensure a booking for him, said Puja Guliani, vice-president of sales and marketing of A4A Hospitality.