Ravi Taneja is a sales and marketing veteran, with most of his experience in the travel industry. As the COO of AxisRooms, he currently oversees all aspects of Sales, Business Development, Strategy as well as Finance.
1. What lead to inception of AxisRoom?
The idea behind the inception of AxisRooms was to provide a platform that can automate the distribution of hotel rooms and streamline the process. We wanted to completely automate it by enabling a hotel to push inventory, price and content through a single dashboard instead of maintaining multiple channels.
2. Tell us about your products and how it can benefit Hoteliers & OTA?
“HEX” is an umbrella product and consists of 3 distribution modules:
- Online Distribution Module: enables a hotelier to distribute the inventory to multiple online channels at a single click instead of maintaining allocations separately at separate channels.
- Private Distribution Module: Enables a hotelier to distribute the realtime inventory to an offline partner like Thomas Cook, FCM Travel Solutions or any corporate for that matter.
- Direct Distribution Module: Enables a hotelier to go online at their own brand site too. This comes with an integrated payment gateway and opens up the avenue for a hotelier to increase their site traffic and acquire a customer at a much lesser distribution product
3. What is your strategy to pursue small & medium hoteliers to use your service?
Well it’s a need of the hour today, every hotelier be it small or medium has a pain of distributing rooms to online/offline channels. It’s not just an expensive affair in fact cause a lot overbooking/underselling challenges. So it’s all about giving them a user friendly system, right price and a right support team to help them cross the line to start using the platform all by themselves.
“We position ourselves as a single player that provides hotels with complete distribution network”
4. Who are your competitors in India? How do you manage to stay foremost?
There are few other players who provide similar solutions on the online distribution module like Maximojo, Rategain, Ratetiger & Siteminder but they only work towards providing distribution to Online Channels.
For distribution towards offline channels, there have been GDSs like Amadeus, Galileo but they are too complex for mass market and obviously come with huge distribution costs. We position ourselves as a single player that provides hotels with complete distribution network at a cost which every single player in the ecosystem can afford.
5. Can you brief us about Unique Hotel Exchange?
The Unique Hotel Exchange also known as “HEX”- is a platform which works like a B2B marketplace for suppliers and their offline buyers to transact on a single platform. The platform also enables the discovery of partners; for e.g. a supplier can contract with the buyer through the platform itself. We are a prime mover in this space and no other distribution company has come close to launching this product.
6. What is your vision for AxisRoom? Where do you see AxisRoom 10 year from now?
Today, we help a hotelier to distribute content and reduce their operational effort and cost. In the coming years, we would also help them to increase their yield by empowering them with strong analytical and revenue management tools.
By 2020 we would be working with 20k hotels and distributing more than 250k room nights per day.
Interview with Mr. Ravi Taneja, COO, Axis Rooms
