WB Hotels announced the launch of its own franchise brand under WB Inn by mid-April 2021. Under this module, all the hotels will be operated with only four staff members as the entire process will be tech-based. Each hotel under WB Inn will have only housekeeping as a department. Chandan Pandey, Co-Founder & COO of WB Hotels said in an interview said, “This will help hotel owners to save a minimum INR 1.5 lakh per month as payroll cost. There will be no dependency on humans, no leakage and the hotel room will be upgraded within 72 hrs as per brand standard similar to 4-star hotel rooms.”
WB Hotels offers co-branding on all online platforms, central reservations to the stand-alone hotel without any payment charged to the hotels. With the company’s investment in human resources and cost of business, WB Hotels take the hotels to all global OTA’S platforms approx. 200+ and GDS platforms.
“We only charge a commission on online gross revenue generated through all online platforms such as (MMT /GO/Booking.com, Agoda etc). The hotel is not giving any commission on offline sales. This makes us the one and only hotel brand which does not take any fixed fee from the hotel. we charge a fee on the online platform only whereas we take the maximum risk to make hotel inventory saleable on global platforms,” Pandey added in a briefing about the business model.
The Mumbai-based company is looking at ten thousand rooms by the end of 2021. Currently, the company has more than 65 hotels, 1500+ keys in 25 locations and 14 states. The company majorly deals with standalone hotels under 50 rooms and most of which are BNB (Bed and Breakfast).
Pandey informed that many hotels got into agreements with another hotel brand without reading the document properly and started losing from day one. Pandemic, however, gave them the opportunity to come out from a one-sided agreement and be part of WB hotels offering hand holding to hotel owners where the owner is only giving unsold inventory on a day-to-day basis with mutually agreed rates. This gives the hotel owner higher ARR on online and offline business.
“We are looking at below 50 rooms to be part of our brand and since we work on technology we can offer our brand globally. We are looking at the MENA region, EUROPE, AFRICA, USA market to penetrate our brand. In India, more than 45 lakhs of hotel rooms are unbranded. We are here to brand 10 lakhs+ rooms at the earliest. Having 10 lakhs + room under our brand will make us the world’s largest hotel company in no time,” said Pandey, elaborating about his expansion plans.
