Oyo Rooms, operated by Oravel Stays Limited (branded as OYO), is an Indian hospitality company that aggregates, franchises and leases budget and mid-segment hotels, homes and living spaces. Headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, the company operates a technology platform through which independent hotel owners list their properties under a standardised brand, with OYO providing distribution, pricing and quality norms. It is among the largest hotel chains in India by branded room count and has a presence across several countries in Asia, Europe and North America.
| Legal name | Oravel Stays Limited |
|---|---|
| Brand | OYO |
| Industry | Hospitality, travel technology |
| Founder | Ritesh Agarwal |
| Founded | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Gurugram, Haryana, India |
| Country of origin | India |
| Type | Private company |
The company was founded by Ritesh Agarwal, an entrepreneur from Odisha, who started Oravel Stays in 2012 as a platform to list bed-and-breakfast and budget accommodation. After observing inconsistent quality across small hotels, the model was reworked in 2013 into the OYO Rooms brand, under which partner hotels offered standardised rooms with defined amenities such as branded linen, Wi-Fi, breakfast and a basic set of furnishings.
Agarwal was a recipient of the Thiel Fellowship, which supported the early phase of the venture. The company subsequently raised capital from investors including SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital and Airbnb.
OYO does not, in most cases, own the underlying real estate. Instead, it works with hotel owners under franchise, manchise (managed franchise) and lease arrangements. Properties are categorised into sub-brands aimed at different price points and use cases, including:
Bookings are made through the OYO mobile application and website, as well as via online travel agencies.
OYO's largest market is India, where it operates across both metropolitan and tier-2/tier-3 cities. International operations have included the United Kingdom, the United States, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and several European countries through its vacation-home brands. The company has at various times listed a network spanning hundreds of cities and tens of thousands of properties, although the precise count has fluctuated as markets were entered, scaled or exited.
OYO's growth attracted attention as one of the most prominent Indian start-ups of the 2010s. The company has also faced criticism and disputes from sections of hotel owners over commercial terms, contract enforcement and payments, leading to legal proceedings in multiple Indian states. Regulatory scrutiny has touched on issues such as listing of unregistered guests, taxation matters and the treatment of partner hotels. The company has periodically revised its contracts and partner policies in response.
Oyo Rooms is regarded as a pioneering example of the Indian "new economy" in the hospitality sector, applying platform economics, standardisation and mobile distribution to a highly fragmented budget-hotel market. It is frequently cited in studies of Indian unicorn start-ups, the SoftBank-backed wave of late-2010s consumer technology investments, and the broader transformation of small-format Indian hotels into branded chains.