AxisRooms makes the process of booking hotels, a step easier

Sanghamitra

BANGALORE, INDIA: Incepted in 2011, AxisRooms today stands with a 62 member team and a strong distribution product which caters to the need of the hospitality industry.

The startup had raised its first funding of $1mn in September 2013 . Today it works with 35 online companies and with more than 1500 independent hotels across India. The company ties up with online and offline channels providing services easily to the end user.

"This market has grown from a 25k hotels in 2011 to 50-55k now. This is an approximate number of the organized hotels, the unorganized number cannot be estimated. The growth has been humungous in the past few years that we have witnessed," says Ravi Taneja, co-founder and COO, AxisRooms.

He adds, "Tier 2 and tier 3 cities show the maximum demand today. With infrastructure and the space available, it has a lot of scope."

Explaining the technology platform that the company has, Ravi says, "Today a hotel works with 15-20 online companies and all the updates is manually done by the hotels in each of the portals' platform. So that is where we try to simplify the process by consolidating everything on one platform. This channel manager product also manages inventory and pricing for all online travel portals."

Based on transactions, the company charges 1-3pc from the hoteliers which will soon be raised to 4-4.5pc soon after few enhancements are added in the product.

"All our products together comes as Hotel Exchange (HEX). One would be the Online Distribution Module, the second is Direct Distribution Module through which customers can make reservations on the hotel site. This is still catching up with the Indian market. And our key product would the be the Private Distribution module which has been recently launched."

The two key objectives that the company is now focusing is:

• Distribution to anyone and everyone
• With analytics being provided by the platform, revenue management and predicting becomes easy within the platform itself

" We intend to make the entire reservation product an automated system and we have succeeded to a large extent. Today more than 300 medium sized hotels are using our platform. With very few players in the domestic market, we remain to be in the forefront," says Ravi.