On your own! The high-tech way! - OYO

The teenage boy – Ritesh Agarwal is the young Founder & CEO of OYO Rooms – the fastest growing Branded network of hotels offline & online.

OYO rooms do nothing out of the box but provide travelers the coolest yet cheapest efficient, young, standardized rooms with no add-ons attached to them!

For those who don’t know, OYO stands for ‘On Your Own. The platform has now become a synonym for budget-friendly rooms. People know it for its affordable accommodation services. The company has kept on adding feathers to its cap ever since it came into the market.

THE SUCCESS STORY

OYO did not become successful overnight. It also had to go through some sequence of events and rough phases. The company’s business was also impacted by the COVID outbreak. 

After starting in 2013, OYO went on to acquire rooms in hotels across the country and transformed them into OYO. The company’s sole aim was to make accommodation good and affordable for its people. 

Ritesh Agarwal has been a wayfarer himself and traveled across the country before launching OYO and during such travels, he discovered the problem with budget hotels. Thus at the mere age of 17, he launched Oravel Travel, which he modeled after Airbnb. However, it later branched out to become OYO rooms. He had discovered that the problem with budget hotels was bigger than just availability, so, to counter other issues, he launched OYO.

Oyo rooms raised $1 billion in September 2018, even a year after that in July 2019 Ritesh Agarwal bought $2 billion in shares in the company, which tripled his shares. In the year 2020, Agarwal’s net worth was around INR 7253 crore which is $1.1 billion as per the Hurun Rich List 2020, making him the world’s youngest self-made billionaire after the famous Kylie Jenner. Ritesh as a founder puts in 16 hours a day to make his dream come true and has been through a wild journey from as far back as he can remember, to get this ahead.

My personal views on the OYO success story are

as follows-

Moral policing in Indian culture is something that we cannot ignore. Even today, couples are humiliated for hugging in public and police raids in hotels are very common.

Apparently, there is primitive thinking maintained in our society about baseless social norms that have been existing since ancient times about pointing out couples seen in public, especially the unmarried ones. Judging and humiliating them as to be having no character and sacraments. 

Yes, there is a certain level of decency that should be maintained by all of us, keeping in mind the beautiful culture and ethics that we have been taught. I fully respect the characteristics that have been imbibed into us as Indians, but having a cheap mentality towards any couple, married or unmarried itself is pretty uncultured and prejudicial.

Here, OYO has stood out to be quite the solution. 

Their app feature’s a ‘relationship mode’ which helps users find couple-friendly hotels, that is, they allow unmarried couples even with local IDs to check-in without any hassles. All of us have the right to privacy, and if we can’t change our thinking, we can atleast mend our ways to deal with the problem.

All in all, the success story of OYO inspires us to think out of the box and hence, provide modern solutions for the modern problems existing in the society as told by Ritesh himself in the following quote –

“Leaders shouldn’t just build and accumulate wealth but give back to society.”

        – Ritesh Agarwal, Founder, and CEO, OYO Hotels & Homes

Written by – 

Ananya Juyal