A Case of Money for Nothing

BW Hotelier spoke with Nasr Khan, the Founder and CEO of NightStay, an app which specialises in last minute hotel room bookings to find out how it helps hotels in staying full. This dark sheep of his family (who are all from the medical profession) says its a win win for hotels trying to flog their unsold inventories last minute. 

The supply side of hotel rooms has increased a lot, but demand hasn't really increased as much. Latest FHRAI and HVS data shows the average occupancy across India at 61 per cent. That leaves around 40 per cent of rooms vacant. It's a perishable inventory, if you don't sell it today, it won't be usable tomorrow. What we are trying to do monetise this expired inventory--taking the last minute unsold inventory and selling it to the hotel guest at a discounted rate. For the hotel it’s a zero rupee property, a dead inventory. We are living in an age of ‘on demand’. We have apps like Uber and Ola which get you cabs immediately. We have apps like Food Panda which get you food on demand. We are trying to build something in the lines of on demand hotels. 

We work through the app (downloadable at http://www.nightstay.in/). Rooms HAVE to be booked from the day of booking. We began with just 24 hour bookings, but we have now expanded, and you can book for 3 nights, but your stay has to start from today. Also the second and third nights are not necessarily discounted. There is no cancellation, because the reservation is last minute.

We are in all the major cities, around 14 of them. We have tied up with Carlson Rezidor, The Park Group, Fortune, most of the major groups except for Taj and Oberoi who we are in talks with. We are also talking with IHG as well.

This is a great way for hotels to sell their expired inventory.  We offer the rooms at nine in the morning till midnight. There is no obligation for the hotel to put their rooms up for sale. They can come in at say, 7 pm and then leave when they want to. When we began, hotels had this concern about brand dilution and inventory cannibalisation, but we take care of that as well, by rotating all the hotels on a regular basis, so there is no predicting which hotel you get a deal from. We also have something called hidden deal where we don't show the name of the property. If the hotel is giving us a rate way below their bar and they don't want to be seen selling at this rate. We give the details and an approximate area. Once the buyer makes the booking, they see the name of the hotel. 

We are saying that you will have to give at least 30 per cent rate from their bar, but there is no cut off. 

We have been around for one year (began in March 2015), currently we have had 75,000 downloads and on a daily basis, we are doing 50 to 60 bookings, that amount to 70 to 80 room nights. Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad are the most popular destinations.

We are planning to expand this and build the app as a de facto app. There is no app known for last minute hotel booking at the moment. There are big OTAs but they are not known for anything in particular.