OYO Hotels: Providing the rich location details customers need to book a great stay, every time
About OYO Hotels & Homes
OYO Hotels & Homes is a hospitality chain on a mission to provide quality living spaces at affordable prices across the 80 countries it serves. It leverages technology to help small-scale hoteliers achieve growth.
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About Lepton Software
Lepton Software is a Google Cloud Premier Partner focused on location analytics, map data, and geospatial consulting. It has offices in India, the Middle East, and Singapore.
OYO Hotels increases bookings and improves user experience on its platform by providing reliable and comprehensive location information through Google Maps Platform.
Results:
- Improves hotel booking experience with clustering abilities of Google Maps Platform
- Enables customers to easily locate places of interest
- Displays accurate directions from hotels to places of interest
Helps to increase overall hotel bookings by 50%
Did you know that the average person visits 38 websites when searching for the best hotel? With so many factors to consider, from location to amenities, convenience, and cost, it can be challenging for travelers to find the right place for their needs.
“Millions of people around the world have to compromise on either location, quality, or price when booking accommodation, and many times this is because they haven’t been given enough information on their options,” says Anil Goel, Group Chief Technology and Product Officer at OYO Hotels. “Our aim is to address this problem by building a comprehensive booking platform that helps our customers make more informed decisions.”
Founded in 2013, OYO Hotels goes beyond the typical hotel stay booking platform, taking ownership of the accommodation experience itself. It works with hotel owners around the world to provide quality yet affordable living spaces and promote them to visitors looking for recommendations on its platform. The company realized that in order to drive more bookings in its hotels around the world, it needed to further dial up the strengths of its listings. To provide more detailed information on each hotel, OYO Hotels worked with partner agency Lepton Software to integrate key APIs and features from Google Maps Platform.
Filters and clusters help travelers to zero in on their ideal hotel
With so many options available on the OYO Hotels platform, the company needed to cluster its hotels in a way that was easier for visitors to navigate. "With Google Maps Platform, we were able to efficiently deliver a visual display of closely clustered hotels in a zoomed-out view. Previously, we might have 50 hotels across a large area, but because a visitor has zoomed out so much, it would look like there are 50 hotels in one particular spot. Now with Google Maps, visitors see just one hotel icon with the number ‘50’ next to it, indicating the number of similar buildings. This helps reduce the visual load for visitors, and makes the page look more presentable," Anil explains.
"Thanks to the inbuilt functionality of Google Maps Platform to filter and cluster items easily, we were able to sort out our listings in just a matter of days. It’s a task that would previously have taken us a few months to complete.”
—Anil Goel, Group Chief Technology and Product Officer , OYO HotelsBeyond delivering a clear visual display of hotels and places of interest, Google Maps Platform also enables OYO Hotels to let customers filter their search against a wide range of criteria. From price to location, facilities, accessibility, and payment options, customers are only shown hotels which meet the criteria that matters most to them, helping to narrow their search. "Thanks to the inbuilt functionality of Google Maps Platform to filter and cluster items easily, we were able to sort out our listings in just a matter of days. It’s a task that would previously have taken us a few months to complete," says Anil.
Taking the platform to the next level with Google Cloud
Beyond Google Maps Platform, the OYO Hotels team is also taking advantage of Google Cloud products to enhance its customer experience by integrating more recommendations in its listings. It uses BigQuery to gain a deeper understanding of what customers want, and Firebase to improve the speed and seamlessness between its mobile and web applications. OYO Hotels also uses Google Analytics 360 to analyze and visualize data from its customers so that it can deliver a smoother experience for visitors. "We use Analytics 360 to make sure our user journey is helping customers move through the website to complete their booking. It also enables us to identify areas for improvement, and create actionable items to avoid drop-offs along the way,” says Anil. “The key areas we look at include the homepage, listing pages, logins, and bookings. Custom reports also help to give us a quick overview of each area’s performance. He adds that the team uses custom dimensions to segment its users so that it can understand how different people respond to the website.
"The ability of Google Cloud products to deliver insights on how people are using our platform, and what they want from it, is extremely useful for helping us to enhance the customer experience. This, together with the rich location data that Google Maps Platform provides, has been the recipe to our success thus far," says Anil.
Working with a partner that understands the business, and the platform
While it’s important to have the right tools for success, understanding how to use them is just as crucial. "The Google Maps Platform team holds quarterly meetings with us to understand our challenges so it can introduce new solutions that are likely to meet our business needs,” shares Anil. “This really helps our product and tech teams as we work toward improving our service offerings.”
He adds that having a partner like Lepton Software that understands Google Maps Platform like the back of its hand further helps with matching the right products to what OYO Hotels wants to achieve. "In the past few months, Lepton Software has helped us analyze and transform a few of our business objectives to the Google Maps Platform products that meet them. The team has been very helpful in monitoring our usage and suggesting the right way forward for us."
"The Google Maps Platform team holds quarterly meetings with us to understand our challenges so it can introduce new solutions that are likely to meet our business needs. This really helps our product and tech teams as we work toward improving our service offerings."
—Anil Goel, Group Chief Technology and Product Officer , OYO HotelsAs OYO Hotels continues to grow, it wants to present itself as more than just a hotel provider, but a hospitality partner that journeys alongside its customers at every stage of their lives. "We’re quickly moving to becoming a place where memories are made, by providing the perfect wedding venue, or honeymoon experience," says Anil. To help propel the business deeper into this next stage, OYO Hotels has increased its focus on personalization: recommending accommodation based on customers’ search history and the past preferences of customers with similar profiles, as well as using localization to further enhance the places of interest shown. "We’re already using image recognition to assign quality scores to hotel images, which improves the quality of a hotel’s details page. We’ve seen some great results from using Google Maps Platform, so the plan is to keep using Google Cloud solutions to take our business to greater heights."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About OYO Hotels & Homes
OYO Hotels & Homes is a hospitality chain on a mission to provide quality living spaces at affordable prices across the 80 countries it serves. It leverages technology to help small-scale hoteliers achieve growth.
About Lepton Software
Lepton Software is a Google Cloud Premier Partner focused on location analytics, map data, and geospatial consulting. It has offices in India, the Middle East, and Singapore.