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 between $5 million (approximately Rs 31 crore) and $8 million (Rs 49 crore) 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 and chief executive officer of Find My Stay, told Business Standard.
Self-funded by Kheterpal and co-founder Simran Sial, the one-year-old company currently offers ‘Find My Stay @ My Price’ service. This service allows users to book a hotel at exactly the price they wish to pay for their stay through online bidding (or reverse auction).
At present, 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 that the company was working on a mobile application, which should be ready for commercial launch in the next three to four 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 that 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.
