Chinese Hotel Firm Rakes in Six-Fold Return as It Sells Minor Stake in Oyo

Ankit Gupta, the India CEO of hospitality technology platform Oyo, and Mandar Vaidya, the head of Oyo’s European operations, will both be moving on from the company.

In the second quarter of 2023, the Middle East’s hotel construction pipeline has seen significant growth, marking its highest project count since the first quarter of 2020, according to Lodging Econometric’s Middle East Hotel Construction Pipeline Trend Report.

Marketers beware: Prior ways of marketing to Chinese consumers, including travelers, won’t work as well today because their preferences changed during the pandemic.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, December 16, and we are headed back from a successful Skift Forum in Dubai. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

India-headquartered travel tech firm RateGain Travel Technologies is acquiring Adara, a Silicon Valley-based firm in travel martech and predictive consumer intelligence. The cost: a mere $16.1 million, according to RateGain’s filing on the Indian stock market, which puts Adara, long troubled with management and competition issues for the last few years, out of its misery.

The Gulf region now has more than 170,000 hotel rooms under active development, which includes planning, final planning and under construction, according to research conducted at the end of September by STR, a hotel market intelligence and global benchmarking company. This active hotel development pipeline now equals 40 percent of the Gulf region’s existing hotel room inventory, a figure almost four times greater than the global average of 11 percent. The STR report estimates 135,560 existing rooms in Saudi Arabia with an active pipeline of 82,639 rooms, with total room inventory projected for 2030, at over 218,000 rooms. Similarly for the United Arab Emirates, the research currently tracks more than 202,000 existing rooms with an active pipeline of 48,910 rooms, a combined total of almost 251,000 rooms by 2030. “Interestingly, Ras Al Khaimah, is second only to Dubai, with 5,076 rooms in its pipeline, almost the same amount as Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and Fujairah combined,” said Danielle Curtis, exhibition director of Arabian Travel Market. The research had been commissioned by Arabian Travel Market.

The initial public offering of India-based budget hotel operator and aggregator Oyo may be further pushed back from its intended deadline of a launch within the first quarter this year.

Keen to pursue its long-anticipated initial public offering (IPO), hospitality tech company Oyo has said it would be refiling its draft red herring prospectus with the Indian stock market regulator Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) by mid-February.

Indian online travel agency EaseMyTrip announced this week that it has acquired a 55 percent stake in hotel booking marketplace cheQin, owned by Gleego Innovations, for around $370,000.

Chinese travelers cite financial constraints over the last three years as the leading reason for not wanting to travel abroad even as China decided to end its zero-Covid policy by easing travel restrictions, according to a report.

Oyo, the India-based budget hotel chain and booking platform, plans to double its premium segment hotel count in Indonesia from around 200 properties to over 400 by the end of 2023.

Indian low-cost carrier SpiceJet said it has restructured its outstanding lease rental worth over $100 million to aircraft leasing firm Carlyle Aviation Partners into equity shares and convertible debentures.