Rooms, checked out

WHEN IT CAME TO NAMING their company, Tanuj Mendiratta and Himanshu Chadha considered several options before settling on “RoomWale.com”. Chadha believes the name goes with what they aspire to build—the go-to website for budget accommodation in India. While it is easy to book top-end accommodation, the budget end is a mishmash of options where one is not quite sure what to expect. That’s what the two 26-year-olds hope to change.

Mendiratta and Chadha want to makes sure that the accommodation they offer meets certain benchmarks. So, RoomWale representatives actually visit the properties—hotels, guest houses, and bed-and-breakfasts—before posting them on the website. They check cleanliness, space and security on the premises, working condition of appliances such as airconditioners, storage, and the quality of food. This, Mendiratta says, also ensures that visitors get what they see in the pictures of the accommodation posted on the site. RoomWale, which currently offers around 2,000 rooms in 25 cities, plans to hire more staff to conduct these checks as it grows.

RoomWale’s office, located in Gurgaon, is in a four-storey building that doubles as a guest house run by the Mendiratta family. That’s where the idea for the website came from, as visitors to the guest house would often talk about the lack of quality budget accommodation in the country.

This, combined with a drive for entrepreneurship, inspired Mendiratta, who graduated in 2010 from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, to take a different road than most of his batch. While his classmates went for attractive salaries during campus placements, Mendiratta teamed up with his friend Chadha, a computer science graduate from Oxford, to start work on

RoomWale in June 2011. The two, who have funded the portal themselves (they weren’t forthcoming with figures), talk of “healthy cash flows”, claiming that the site gets 40 bookings a day. They have received offers for funding but insist that they are in no hurry to accept them because their priority at the moment is quality, not growth.

RoomWale wants to be an aggregator for budget accommodation in India but is facing competition from sites such as U.S.-based Airbnb, which offers non-hotel properties but does not review its listings. However, because of better recognition and having opened earlier in 2008, Airbnb has 600 listings for New Delhi and nearly 3,000 across India. This also draws more hosts.

Achin Khanna, associate director at hospitality services consultancy HVS, says the huge number of unbranded hotels and other budget options are the ones that will benefit from websites such as RoomWale by increasing their outreach. Studies by HVS have found that India will need 180,000 more hotel rooms by 2021, of which nearly 46,000 will be in the budget category. Clearly, there’s a lot of room for RoomWale to build its business.