RoomsTonite, the last minute hotel booking service provider, has recently announced funding of USD 1.5 million from a group of angel investors. The Bengaluru based startup is looking to expand its base of hotels and further improve technology with the funds.
The investors include Nikhil Vora (founder of Sixth Sense Ventures), Lashit Sanghvi (co-founder of Alchemy Capital), Vebkar Vardhan (promoter of DNA Networks), Mohammed Bin Abdul Rehman Al Khalifa (Chairman of Caravan Group), Ralph Berezan (Berezan Group) and Vissal Mathew and Balamurali Krishna (IDS Software).
RoomsTonite is also in talks with few institutional investors to raise another USD 7 million to USD 10 million in Series A funding to further accelerate growth.
RoomsTonite allows travellers to book last minute hotels at huge discounts. For most parts of the year, hotels have got huge number of unsold room nights. RoomsTonite allows them to sell these room nights and generate additional revenues out of the unsold room nights. As it is meant to deal only with the unsold inventory at last minute, bookings can be made only up to 3 days in advance. Revenues come from a commission based model similar to OTAs.
Speaking on the occasion, Suresh John, CEO and Co-Founder, RoomsTonite said “While technology is at the forefront of what we do at RoomsTonite, our constant focus is to ensure that customers get the experience of real time booking at a great price and to further help them with their last minute travel plans through our platform.”
“On the hotels front, we are a unique platform to help sell their unsold inventory (which otherwise would have been empty). So, hotels can earn additional revenue through RoomsTonite, and therefore increase their RevPAR (revenue per available room),” adds John.
As young travellers have started considering alternative stays over hotels, RoomsTonite earlier introduced vacation rentals on the app to stay in line with the changing trends. Recently they also announced partnership with Paytm to offer their inventory to Paytm customers. This will give them a wider reach and trustworthy payment options allowing them to quickly expand their customer base.
