Room on Call: Your Hotel Booking Partner, Just a Call Away
Date: Thursday , December 03, 2015
It all started with a bad experience at a Hotel in Agra, where Pradeep Sajjan - a high-profile executive - was exposed to a prevailing, yet a bitter reality, which entailed the discrepancy in pricing, the quality of the food and the hotel rooms between Indians and foreigners. Such situations are more ignored than addressed. But the anecdote of Pradeep is little twisted. The surging proportions of aforementioned intricacies lured him to join forces with like-minded people, Amit Goel and Nirupma Dhawan, who then scrutinized the industry through rigorous research and diligence. After identifying that feature phone users overpower the smartphone users particularly app users, the trio forayed into the hotel industry and banked upon a huge growth potential to construct an out-of -the box platform, where people can easily and effectively book a room of their choice on a call. Named Room on Call (ROC), the cloud-based platform is widely recognized as a branded budget accommodation marketplace and has been proactively working towards systematizing the fragmented industry, thus bringing them under a banner by assisting them to maintain their quality and standard.
Though a much-hyped trend, starting up one\'s own business is not an easy feat and the most daunting task is enabling the business to take off. The six months young venture also faced a significant competition from the already established giants like OYO Rooms and ZO Rooms, but steadily combated the challenge by carving a niche with its creative concept. Spearheaded by a robust management team, ROC leverages room reservations for business travel, events and even get-together. On the other hand, it also serves as a platform for hotels to popularize their properties globally.
A Look into the Strong Process
Dedicated to provide world-class customer service, ROC not only enables its users to easily book an accommodation, but also handholds them throughout their tenure in that respective hotel. Once an individual book a room in a hotel through the assistance of ROC call center, he/she can make the payment through a link which is sent by the call center itself. While a real-time confirmation message or an email from the hotel indicates a successful booking procedure, a relationship manager is assigned to the client to guide through his journey. Sitting at the back-end and taking the clients through the nooks and corners of the city with the use of GPS, his/her charter will be to ensure that the client has reached the destination safely. With such unique features in its arsenal, ROC is currently in the phase of launching a mobile app. The app is rearing up to hit the market soon and beholds many unique features like weather reporting and SOS facility. While the weather reporting of the respective place helps travellers to make a sound decision on their plans and pack their bags with the right clothes, SOS option intimidates hotel reception desk in case of any emergency and the same is redirected to their family as a message. Irrespective of the distance, the customer can even be close to his/her family through the video conferencing feature of the soon-to-be-launched app. Steering towards the Success
Recently, ROC was on the pages of media for raising $300K as its seed fund from Payal Syal - a Senior Executive at Yahoo! - and is currently in talks with many investors for its further fundraising activities. Speaking about such feats, Pradeep, the CEO of ROC, proclaims, \"When we kicked-off our operations in May, we had only two properties of Gurgaon, but now we possess around 400 properties in around 34 cities and want to spread our wings in another 100 cities in a next year\". The company claims to have a record booking of more than 18000 room nights in a month.
Indian e-Commerce is at very initial phase. Most of the companies have spent huge on marketing by raising multiple rounds of funding in last one year hence thrived of cash flows, yet struggling to make money. In this industry, there is huge market which is untapped and people still follow traditional ways of booking hotel rooms through travel agents or walking to any property to book hotels of their choice. Room on call is currently working on margins of 10-14 percent by minimizing customer acquisition costs and competing with leading and oldest players by maintaining cash flows and margins. Room on Call currently caters to more than 50 Corporates and Fortune 500 companies by maintaining quality and service levels.
Panel:
Key Management:
Pradeep Sajjan, Co-Founder & CEO
A serial entrepreneur, Pradeep is highly acknowledged for his corporate strategies, development specialties and consistency in delivering mission-critical results. Before founding Room On Call, he has successfully served in high profile executive roles in eminent organizations like PepsiCo and Natraj Group.
Amit Goel, Co-Founder & CTO
As a computer engineer, Amit has been a part of MNCs like Siebel Systems (now a part of Oracle) and HP, as well as few startups on software products, helping them in taking their ideas to delivery. Claimed as an out-of-the-box innovator and a technologist, he has previously worked with multiple domains which include payments, service assurance, CRM and e-Commerce. Nirupma Dhawan, Co-Founder & COO
Before co-founding Room On Call, Nirupma was responsible for country portfolio for various FMCG, Fashion and Retail customers. Responsible for country-wide strategic planning for property acquisition, her current task is to look after on site growth and data analytics, transformation of properties, call center operations, vendor management and customer retention.
Headquarter: Gurgaon
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