Hourly hotel booking company MiStay raises funding from ah! Ventures, others

Hourly hotel booking company MiStay has raised an undisclosed amount of investment from Mumbai-based angel investor network ah! Ventures and a group of investors led by Sumit Nagpal, a Hyderabad based software professional and former entrepreneur.

MiStay will deploy the funds to grow the leadership team and build up its brand, the Bengaluru-based company said in a statement.

The company has not disclosed the round of funding or any other details of the investment. An email sent to MiStay did not elicit a response at the time of publishing this article. 

Founded in 2016 by Pranav Prabhakar and  Sandeep Jaiswal, MiStay is a travel-tech company that lets users book a hotel room on an hourly basis with flexible check-in and check-out time.

The online hotel booking company said that the average hotel occupancy rate in India stands at around 65%, thus the unsold hotel rooms constitute around $6 billion of missed revenue opportunity for hotels.

“The micro-stay model brings a unique revenue optimisation opportunity for the hotels. Our product helps hotels realise their full revenue potential by unlocking the value in hotel inventory during the hours it remains unutilized. Hotels can in fact run at more than 100% occupancy,” said Pranav Prabhakar, the co-founder and chief technology officer, MiStay. 

The company currently operates in 100 cities with around 1,500 hotel partners. It counts The Park, Radisson, Holiday Inn as well as mid-scale hotel chains such as Lemon Tree, Mango Hotels and the Mint Hotels among its partners. 

It competes with FabHotels and Bengaluru-based Treebo in this segment.

MiStay claims to have grown five times and hit operational profitability in June this year. It had previously raised the first round of seed investment in 2017. 

“Travelers today no longer want to plan their trip based on the hotels’ check-in time. The hotel industry is poised to transform to meet these evolving travelers’ needs. This transition, however, requires disrupting the age-old technological ecosystem in the hotel industry and raising the operational capabilities of hotels,” said Sandeep Jaiswal, co-founder and chief executive officer, MiStay.