OYO ties up with Chinese e-commerce platform Meituan to drive traffic

Oravel Stays Pvt Ltd, which operates accommodation platform OYO Hotels & Homes, today said it inked a year-long pact with Meituan, a China-based e-commerce platform for services.  

Under the partnership, OYO Jiudian (Hotels) will list 8,000 of its standardised accommodations on the Meituan Hotels platform. This will help OYO to drive consumer traffic, data operations and brand promotion, the hotel aggregator said in a statement. 

This partnership will combine OYO Jiudian’s capacities in business development, management and operations with Meituan’s ecosystem to enable access to OYO’s accommodations across China, the statement added.

Sam Shih, COO at OYO China, said: “Our partnership with Meituan is a reflection of our commitment to providing quality living spaces to consumers and creating higher value for small and medium sized standalone hotel owners across China.”

OYO’s China arm is now present across 337 cities with 500,000 rooms. The Indian hospitality chain had entered China in 2017. 

Meituan was founded in 2010 as an e-commerce platform for services. It operates mobile apps such as its eponymous app Meituan, Dianping, Waimai and Mobike in China. The platform offers services in over 200 categories such as catering, on-demand delivery, car-hailing, bike-sharing, movie ticketing and other entertainment and lifestyle services. It covers over 2,800 cities and counties across China, the statement said. 

Late last month, OYO had inked a strategic partnership with China’s largest online travel services platform Ctrip to build on customer acquisition and branding. 

This week, OYO pumped $100 million into OYO Jiudian, as part of a larger cumulative $600 million investment commitment towards its Chinese hotel operations arm.