Marketing

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Home Away from Home: A pioneer in room aggregation business

Submitted by:

1. Amit Gupta (Roll No.8)
2. Sushil Kumar (Roll No.33)
3. Chirag Pruthi (Roll No. 41)
4. Raman Choudhary (Roll No. 38)
5. Divyadeep (Roll No.40)
6. Vikas singh (Roll No.18)

(Turnitin Plagiarism similarity was 0% on submission of this artifact)

About HAFH

HAFH, also known Home Away From Home is an hotel room aggregator startup  headquartered in Noida which allows booking of budget hotels using a phone based application. It is India’s biggest hotel network which is spread across 220 cities with 8300 hotels and provides a consistent and hassle free customer experience. From searching the best suited hotel, to check-in, and to check-out  it covers you throughout your stay along with a 24 *7 support. The company came into existence in 2013 when his founder Sushil Choudhary ,who was an ardent travel blogger and a computer programmer, was tired of staying at relatives houses in most of the cities he went . He did not feel at home because every relative had his/her own rules of the house which the guests were expected to follow. In other cities  where he stayed in a hotel he experienced struggles in finding the right hotel, at the right price, and at the right place. Therefore he decided to create an application which could make hotel stay a hassle free experience. He

HAFH today operates in India, Nepal, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia and has so far received more than 1 billion dollars of funding from investors such as EasyBank ,Investor Capital ,and Ultraspeed ventures.

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About Sushil Choudhary

He was born and raised in remote town  of Deoria in the state of Uttar Pradesh  where majority of the population lived  below the poverty line and  where he belonged to a business class family. He was always fascinated by coding/computer programming when he was just eight years old and when he reached 12th grade, he made up his mind that he will take up computer programming as his career option

He was a multi-talented student .While he was preparing for the prestigious IIT entrance engineering exam he wrote and published a book in 2009, “Indian Engineering Colleges” . This book turned out to  be a super hit seller  on Fastkart ecommerce platform.In 2011, he moved to Delhi with plans of starting up something of his own and at the same  time also kept on preparing for SAT  because he also wanted to relocate to the Europe for higher studies.

In 2012,He started his new venture as YoTravel Stays Pvt. Ltd. This was his first startup.At the age of 20 in the year 2013, He was selected among the top ten winner for the Thiel Fellowship-A fellowship is a global contest intended for students under the age of 20 for college dropout having unique idea of startup. He was the first Asian to receive this recognition.

Room Aggregation Business in India

Hotel sector in India is expected to be around 370 billion dollars by the end of 2019. The segment has been receiving more focus because as of today only 25% of the hotel bookings are done through internet which leaves a wide gap to fill. On the other end with the arrival of room aggregators such as  HAFH this gap has been filling fast(exhibit1) . As of today the hotel sector is divided into two categories :

1. OBA - Online budget room aggregator
2. OTA - Online Travel agencies

Under the OBA category there are around 16 budget aggregators in addition to HAFH  .Whereas under the OTA category are all the major multinational player like AirBB, MakeYourTrip,EasyTrip etc.

Business Model

HAFH integrates with other hotels, to standardize offerings.It also conducts physical quality checks on weekly basis, and train the staff. It also provides cash back offers to the customers based on their feedback. All the inventory, bookings, availability is handled by it’s technology platform. The prices of the rooms available in the hotel can vary depending on the various factors such as availability, features of the room, occasions, etc. For all the firms HAFH charges between 15% to 20% as commision on every booking.

HAFF is a mobile first company which comprises of different apps to fulfill different goals like verification, audit, quality checks, performance trackers etc. With such a tracking, all the issues can be handled at lowest in the real time. This has got a great success and got a support from the users with more than 6,00,000 downloads in initials three month post launch.

Another aspect of the business model is to make it easily accessible to all the users. For that, HAFF integrates with home owners who want to rent out their homes which should have  minimum area of  4000 sq. ft. Such buildings are named as ‘HAFH Paradise’. The Paradise would have facilities as snacks bar, TV set equipped with digital streaming service Netflix, lounges with Kindle and high-end WiFi. All the staffs will be recruited by HAFH only. Special training centers have been set up for  the staff. Every things will be done to give exclusive feeling to the customer.

HAFH also opened HAFH-we chain for the women travellers. In such hotels all women will be hired and hence it is considered to be a safe place for women travellers to stay. The building will be hired for such hotels on monthly/semi-annually/annually rental basis.

Brand Positioning

HAFH follows a blue ocean strategy and believes that the true customer value cannot be locked only through a tangible offering but also by intangible offerings. The company has branded itself as the king of budget hotel hospitality. Unlike its competition, HAFH never lists the names of the hotel partner on its online platform , instead it follows a co-branding model and lists the hotels with its own names .It’s founder Mr. Sushil Choudhary believes that  for customers it is more important to have a sense of security, basic room hygiene, and predictable service  when compared with fancy lobbies, swimming pool, Italian breakfast. The name of the hotel , company believes restores faith  and trust in the customer that they are covered throughout their journey with HAFH . HAFH has classified the hotel names on its platform into the following categories: