Always Degree Can’t Buy You Success: The Ritesh Agarwal Story

Introduction

All dropouts are not unsuccessful in their life, here comes the biggest example of Mr. Ritesh Agarwal who is also a dropout from college and started his own successful career as an entrepreneur when he was just a 25years old boy. He started a project back in 2012 named ‘OYO Rooms’ which is basically a chain of hotels for the middle-class as well as for the ones who prefer to stay in a luxury environment at reasonable prices and currently it is one of the biggest examples of successful marketing and has a widespread chain of hotels all over India and also in China. Mr. Ritesh Agarwal the co-founder of ‘OYO Rooms’ has a unique story behind his success at this young age and he has also become an influencer for all the aspiring young entrepreneurs.

The history of the brand

The start-up OYO Room was developed by the young boy Ritesh Agarwal who was born and brought up in Orissa. Since his schooling days, he always had a soft corner for technologies and software. He started exploring codes at the age of 8, with time his soft corner turned into a forever love for tech things.

He was a dropout from the University of London’s course at Indian Business School. He started with his first venue in 2012 which was named ‘Oravel stays’, it provided bed and breakfast all over India. So, the venture was going positively and was working well as a start-up. 

Everything was going well, he was also highlighted and won prizes but he realized something was missing. Then he started travelling more and exploring different hotels for his business and he found that not every hotel is easy to find and affordable. This is where he came up with a new thought about changing the scenario and targeting the problems. 

In 2013, he again started his venture named it is as OYO Rooms instead of Oravel stays and become the largest chain of hotels all over India. 

This is how OYO rooms become a successful brand and started serving the best rooms to everyone at affordable prices.

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The Motto

The motto of this brand is to serve the best hotel rooms at a pocket-friendly price and at the same time maintaining all the basic requirements of the rooms of every individual people. They have solved all the targeted problems of a traveller starting from prices of the room, locations, easy bookings, and services like wifi, quality food, followed by all necessary amenities in a single click on phone.

They came up with a very important solution for those who hate standing in long queues to reserve their hotel rooms, instead, they can easily book their hotel digitally with a single click. It will save time, energy as well as money for the customers. 

Lastly, OYO Room was created to make a strong relationship and a long-term bond with the customers which can’t be fulfilled without trust and promises they make to do. They fulfilled all the promising commitments and gained the trust of their clients and this is how they did their successful branding and opened their chains of hotels in 13 more countries and will enhance more in coming years.

Earning money

OYO Room’s strategy was not to invest a huge amount yet becoming one of the top brands of India. OYO Rooms never launched a single hotel of its own but they use to tie up with different hotels by serving the customers and demanding a commission against it.

This is how they have started making tie-ups with different hotels all over the country and this partnership leads to great success. Their name was listed in every hotel and this enhanced the business of hotels as well as the OYO Rooms. It was started in 2013 with less amount profit but later in 2019, they were the highest business marketing with approximate 1.45 lakhs rooms in India and globally also.

Strategies

1. Their best add-on is the fast booking process. It process helps the customer to save a lot of time and energy by just booking the hotel they want with one click. It makes the effort of booking a hotel easier and makes it user-friendly for all types of audiences.
2. Another advantage was setting up a less budget program for OYO Room and starting price was Rs. 999. The less budget program helps this application to be available and applicable for a larger customer base and helps the hotel chain to earn more by getting more customers by keeping the attractive prices.
3. They always maintained the quality both in and out. Only keeping low budget won’t help an application to attract customers so they decided to provide quality that will attract customers and break the rule of low budget low hygiene rather provide the best quality at low budget.
4. They provide professional services with trained staff, clean bathrooms, quality rooms and 24/7 customer support. With quality and price, one would also have to maintain the service by looking at the customers with varied age groups most customers would fumble with an application at the first time so to get them a smoother experience a team is enabled to give assistance 24/7. They would even take care of the complaints to make everything a hassle-free experience.
5. Every 6 hotels are looked after by one cluster manager every week to check everything about the hotel, rooms and services. Just creating an application may be beneficial for the CEO but in this case, he wanted it not only to be profitable but also to be genuine and satisfying, so looking after the hotels and checking with the quality is a must in this case.
6. Apart from their successful marketing and branding both online and offline, their social media has crossed thousands of followers and over 1.5 million apps downloads which states that social media plays an important role for OYO Rooms.
7. OYO Room app shows the latest updates online where everyone can search with a single click with their required preferences and provides various offers with quick booking.

Conclusion 

Every perfect looking business needs a lot of effort to make it look perfect in front of the customers and also the competitors. The efforts may go wasted if the direction is wrong but with the right direction right effort and right strategy one can build an empire as Ritesh Agarwal did. A common household name can become one of the most successful Entrepreneur not only by profits but also by serving the customer in the right way and having a large base of the audience with satisfaction and positivity about an application that is new from its other competitor.

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