Ritesh Agarwal, the Amazingly Ambitious Hotelier
OYO became the world’s No. 2 hotel operator by room count, and it’s poised to overtake No. 1 Marriott International Inc. early next year.
Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of OYO Rooms.
Photographer: Heather Sten for Bloomberg Businessweek
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When he was 19, Agarwal spent three months traveling around India. In places such as Darjeeling, Delhi, Goa, Kerala, and Rajasthan, he lived a budget traveler’s nightmare: filthy hotels with dirty sheets, roaches, lizards, bedbugs, peeling wall paint, doors that didn’t close properly, foam blocks that passed as mattresses, and buckets to collect water for bathing. “I learned something truly fascinating in my journeys,” he says from OYO’s headquarters outside Delhi. His takeaway: There was a huge business opportunity in standardizing and improving service in hotels with 150 rooms or fewer that the major chains ignored. The first OYO opened in Gurgaon in 2013 with high-thread-count sheets, thick mattresses, flatscreen TVs, and hot water. Occupancy rates went from 18% to 90% in the first month, Agarwal says.