India's fascinating innovation with a new sector -- online aggregated budget accommodation -- took another turn today as Ixigo debuted a "curated metasearch" product, branded as "Super Value Hotels".
In the past year, the spotlight has shone on Indian budget hotel owners rebranding their properties, committing to standardized service levels, and allowing their distribution to be managed centrally by companies like OYO Rooms and Zo Rooms.
In the new product, Ixigo selects hotels for indexing by its metasearch tool. It expects that all of the hotels meet a minimum standard and have common features.
About 2,500 hotels are part of the brand, out of a total of some 12,000 budget hotels it has available.
The curated properties includes inventory from the leading branded budget providers, such Oyo Rooms, Wudstay, Zo Rooms and Vista Rooms, as well as hotels chosen from sites like Booking.com, Makemytrip.com, Hotels.com, Goibibo.com and Agoda.com.
It plans to double the number of Super Value Hotels properties by the end of the year.
The meta currently works only on ixigo.com. CEO and co-founder Aloke Bajpai said that the product would be integrated into its apps "very soon."
The move comes at a pivotal moment for Indian budget hotel sector which boomed over the past eighteen months or so.
A few weeks ago MakeMyTrip announced that it would stop selling OYO and Zo and was launching its own curated selection of budget accommodations under the brand Value Plus.
Related reading:
Ixigo preps intercity cabs, sees apps embedded into Micromax handsets (Oct 2015)