Hotelbeds, OYO Hotels & Homes Form Distribution Partnership

NEW DELHI—Hotelbeds, a business-to-business bed bank and OYO Hotels & Homes, the world’s sixth largest hotel chain, forged a strategic global distribution partnership. The preferred agreement represents OYO’s first-ever distribution partnership with a bed bank.

The partnership provides OYO with access to more than 60,000 travel buying intermediaries around the world that use the Hotelbeds platform, including tour operators, airline websites, points redemption programs, loyalty plans from more than 140 source markets.

As a result, Hotelbeds’ clients will have access to OYO’s portfolio of more than 18,000 franchised and leased hotels and over 10,000 homes and villas, across 10 countries, including India, China, Malaysia, Nepal, the U.K., UAE, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and now Japan.

Through this partnership, OYO Hotels & Homes, will be able to distribute its hotel rooms via both the wholesale channel, which operates under the Hotelbeds name and the retail travel agent channel, which operates under the Bedsonline brand—all united under one contract.

“OYO Hotels & Homes is one of the most talked about hotel brands currently and is massively shaking up the entire sector,” said Mark Redmond, head of global chains at Hotelbeds. “So, we at Hotelbeds are very pleased to be the first travel distributor given the privilege to work with them. As the largest budget hotel chain, it represents a new offering for our 60,000 plus travel buying clients using our platform, such as travel agents and tour operators—meaning our distribution channel sits perfectly with their needs. While they currently have an impressive 515,000 rooms, they’re set to increase up to one million by the end of the year and we’re looking forward to helping them find incremental and higher-yielding bookings for many of those rooms.”

Maninder Gulati, chief strategy officer, OYO Hotels & Homes, added: “At OYO, our mission is to create a perfect space in every place by ensuring the best possible experience for our guests, and having Hotelbeds as a strategic global partner supports this vision. Hotelbeds distribution channel of B2B travel buyers helps us access new customer segments and geographies. The bed bank company’s cost-efficient distribution channel makes them an ideal partner to achieve our goal.”

A global-first, OYO Hotels brings a distinctive equilibrium between demand and supply gap of quality living spaces through proprietary technology, efficient operations, staff training, civil transformation, inventory management, revenue management, and customer relationship manager, according to the company. All these facets come together to improve a hotel’s performance by delivering a quality-assured experience. Subsequently, hoteliers can take advantage of the technology to boost occupancy and deliver enhanced customer experience.

In October last year, Hotelbeds revealed the consolidation of all of its brands in the wholesale channel —GTA, Tourico Holidays and Hotelbeds— under the name of Hotelbeds, phasing out the Tourico Holidays and GTA brands. With this, Hotelbeds Group and its wholesale brand are now simply known as Hotelbeds.

More recently, in early February, Hotelbeds also announced that now 90% of its current 180,000 hotel partners now have access to all of the 60,000 travel buying intermediaries—such as tour operators and travel agents—that use the company’s platform, following the integration of GTA and Tourico Holidays into the company recently.