How This Tech Startup Is Transforming Revenue Management System For Hotels- Aiosell Technologies

• ByStartupStory     |    July 17, 2021

“In Entrepreneurship, there are no fixed rules to be followed. Entrepreneurship is all about innovation and implementation.  It is a learning as you grow model. ” says Siddharth Goenka, Founder, and CEO of Aiosell Technologies in conversation with Startup story.

Man behind the Aiosell

Sidharth, a computer science engineer from Purdue University in the US. He had worked as a software engineer at Microsoft in Seattle. Moved to India in 2006, had done his MBA from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. Later, he worked as a management consultant in Accenture and Carlson Marketing based in Mumbai. In 2012, he joined the hospitality industry as his family business, from there he understands the hotel industry. Furthermore, he expanded the hotel chain to 15 hotels till now. 

 Beginning of Aiosell

When we asked Sidharth about the idea behind the establishment of Aiosell he said, “So Aiosell was a part of my journey. While working as a hotelier, I was my own customer. I realized there’s an apparent need for pricing intelligence, automation, and integration in the hotel marketing landscape”. Initially, I started surfing on my own around the world whether there’s a tech-product as such which could help in pricing decisions. But I realized that there’s not a tech-driven product available in the market back then which could resolve the issue to the extent I wanted to. That’s where the story of Aiosell starts.

He further continued sharing the Aiosell emergence with Startup Story,‘ Initially, Aiosell started as a simple service-oriented revenue management service for hotels in our network that weren’t aware of the leverages of online marketing and digital practices that are currently prevalent in the market’. And that’s how one thing led to another and made Aiosell what it’s today. ‘In 2016, I started consulting other hotels to use this service-driven model, assisting them in increasing their online market, pricing, and revenue management.’ Finally, in 2019 we officially launched this service as a product. And, today the startup has more than 200+ hotels as clients across the globe.

Team behind the success of Aiosell

When asked about the team of Aiosell, Siddharth told Startup Story that Aiosell has a very small and dynamic team of technological developers, engineers, account managers, and service people’’. The main goal of Aiosell’s is to maintain a high degree of efficiency and focus more on individual responsibility. ‘So, we combine responsibility, accountability and to encourage our team members we share the benefits of the company in the team.’

Effects of Covid on Aiosell

About Covid impact on Aiosell Sidharth told Startup Story, ‘Because of Covid, Aiosell had faced two effects, short term, and long term.’ Short term impact was quite extreme on the startup. As the whole hotel industry was shut down due to covid, so it means the B2B startup which was providing value-added service and technology for this industry had no reason to exist. ‘We did lose clients and revenue for the short term.’ However, with this covid crisis, hotels have realized the value of adopting automation technology. The long term effect of Covid on startup may have a positive impact on Aiosell. “We believe that eventually adding more technology and AI in the hospitality industry will be accepted by hotels around the world and that will lead to the long-term growth of our startup”.

Services offered by Aiosell

Aiosell offers all one hotel management in the marketing system. Earlier there were two kinds of systems that hotels had followed. One is the hotel management system and hotel distribution system. Aiosell product brings all of these together with a unique USP of intelligence, dynamic pricing & with some sort of contextual AI. It combines hotel management and hotel marketing into one system. Moreover, Automation, Integration, and AI are the core pillars which makes Aiosell unique in the market. It connects with existing OTAs including Google, Expedia, and Make my trip. It incorporates the hotel’s existing systems, either the Channel Manager or PMS, to get real-time inventory status of rooms that are pushed down to the OTAs. PMS receives real-time bookings from OTAs, making the entire process automated. Besides this, Aiosell offers supplementary products such as Rate Shopper, Reputation Management, Accounting Report, and Booking Engine.

Market Expansion & Funding

On asking about Aiosell’s process of market expansion by Startup Story Siddharth said, Aiosell is in the early stages of growth. We’re more focused on product development. 20-30% are our international clients, we acquire customers from three sources.  Over the last two years, we started attending a lot of travel exhibitions, trade shows where we met hoteliers, potential partners across the world. So, either they became direct partners or resellers in different parts of the world. Another process of expanding business is digital marketing through which we increase our sales leads from both paid and organic methods. However, the third channel of expanding the Aiosell where our existing customers or resellers ended up becoming the extension of our product.

Siddharth told the Startup Story about funding that Aiosell is a fully bootstrapped company. “Before launching our product, we had customers ready because we were from the hotel industry, we understood the need for the product. We generate our revenue and invest in our product to fuel the growth of our business”. Hence, we don’t have any external funding yet.

Challenges & Competition faced by Aiosell

When asked about the challenges & competitions the company had faced so far to this Sidharth replied, Aiosell is a hybrid Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model as it’s not fully self-service the customer needs to interact with the company over a period of time to ensure that the customer is using product services to its best advantages. ‘As it’s not something that we sell and the customer is on self-service mode and it’s something which we will encounter more, the more we’ll expand. We’re still figuring out the best ways to tackle it. But for the time being we have productized, standardized, and defined operating procedures from closing customer leads to onboarding a new customer onto our platform to filling out all the details, the interaction between clients & teams, assisting clients on a real-time basis.’ We believe that good automation, technology, and SOP’s will be able to resolve these issues as well in the future. In terms of competition, there are few products available in the market around the world such as Revenue management products, hotel management systems, and channel manager distribution. However, there are very few products in the world that offer all these three services in one unique product such as Cloudbeds, Easytechnosis, etc.

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