Dubai: In light of the recent developments with Oyo, Mr. Khurram Shroff, Chairman of IBC Group and Gallery Suites in Dubai, has reached out to OYO Hotels & Homes and all its employees, with a plan for funding and restructuring the hospitality brand. OYO Hotels & Homes, one of the fastest growing tech start-ups in hospitality, has had to scale back expansion recently.
Mr. Shroff has reached out to the founder and CEO of OYO Hotels & Homes, Mr Ritesh Agarwal, to help him restructure and showcase the company’s strengths. Commending OYO on having done a spectacular job in the past, Mr. Shroff is proposing to take on employees who might otherwise find their services superfluous to the new structure. The aim behind this offer is to support the employees, as well to help OYO Hotels & Homes strengthen its position at this time. “We will join hands with these thousands of deserving employees – offering them jobs with Gallery Suites in India and UAE,” he said, adding that they had “received over 350 applications from all around the world”.
Mr. Shroff’s Gallery Suites Vacation Rentals, based out of Dubai, had announced in August 2019 that it had tied up with OYO Rooms in a Dh18 billion deal to manage around 10,000 holiday homes in India and the UAE, a contract which is now being restructured.
The Gallery Suites team has been working closely with OYO Hotels & Homes over the last year and has developed a good relationship with the company and several of its staff. As an entrepreneur who is active in the short-term rentals and holiday homes space, which OYO has also been involved in, Mr. Shroff is a great supporter and champion of the concept and believes in the Oyo brand. To this end, he believes that his initiative can help the employees, along with his open offer to buy out the home division instead of going in for a partnership.
“We (Gallery Suites) are restructuring the contract with OYO to just have an OTA relationship because they have 40 million users on their App, so they are going to just provide us their demand of users. Our intention is to find positives in the emerging circumstances, by issuing an open letter to hire their employees, and possibly an open letter to purchase OYO’s Home Division.” Mr Shroff said.
OYO Hotels & Homes is the world’s third-largest and fastest-growing hospitality business of leased and franchised hotels, homes, and living spaces. Founded in 2013 the chain, which had consisted mainly of budget hotels, has, in a little over six years, become a globally recognized brand with thousands of rooms, vacation homes and hotels in several countries including India, Sri Lanka, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, the UK, and USA, among other markets.