According to founder Ritesh Agarwal, OYO saw over 4.5 lakh bookings on New Year’s Eve
- ByStartupStory | January 2, 2023
According to founder and group CEO Ritesh Agarwal, OYO saw a record 4.5 lakh or more bookings on New Year’s Eve, the company’s biggest bookings per hotel per day for India in the previous five years.
Agarwal discussed the “busiest day of the year” for the travel technology business in a series of tweets, revealing that OYO had more bookings in Varanasi than Goa.
“Over 450k-plus bookings were made on this New Year’s Eve globally. This is 35 per cent more than last year. We are also seeing the highest bookings per hotel per day for India in the last 5 years,” Agarwal informed.
There was a significant increase in travel and tourism in 2022. While business and cultural travel have greatly boosted the sector in India, leisure travel has been driving the travel recovery curve globally.
“Bookings from Goa are rising by the hour. But guess the city that is overtaking Goa Varanasi,” Agarwal said in a tweet. Additionally, he provided data from OYO’s annual Travelopedia 2022 trends index, which revealed that small towns are experiencing the largest rise in bookings.
In 2022, Uttar Pradesh overtook California as the state with the most visitors, per OYO data. The largest increase in bookings was seen in smaller towns and cities including Hathras, Srinagar in Uttarakhand, Sasaram, Karaikudi, and Tenali in 2022 as compared to 2021.
Talking about the overall surge in activity during New Year’s eve, Agarwal said, “Over 1M (million) people were looking to book on OYO’s app & website. The price changes on our app have gone up to 12.7 million times.”