When we travel, we all want the most affordable, easily accessible and available, sanitary, safe, and convenient place to stay––a home away from home. However, we know from past experiences that those providing accommodations or stays have their traditional barriers in place to keep us away. These barriers include early booking or unavailability, unaffordability–premium charges with no discounts, excessive hassle, and insufficient or no convenience. Finally, the experience exhausts us completely.
Breaking this traditional mindset is what innovations are known for, and Bag2Bag Travels and Hospitality Services India is becoming popular for shattering our negative perspective about inconvenient accommodations by bringing in India’s fastest-growing innovation in the entire hospitality experience.
Three friends, Alok Mishra, Anurag Tiwari, and Gaurav Garg, are achieving this marvellous feat as the Co-founders, who all come from the tech background and have contributed to top-notch MNCs grow across the world by holding key engineering and management roles.
Friends on the Road to Success
All three Co-founders have pivoted into new domains and took the challenge to innovate and change trends in online accommodation booking and hospitality. They have applied their skills and knowledge from corporate and research to manage and grow this company so far in its niche. With their innovative mindsets, together, this trio has pooled their joint efforts that allowed Bag2Bag to carefully carve its niche with hourly rooms and have now expanded into extended stays, F&B and experiences. Gaurav is currently leading the tech as CTO, Anurag is leading business operations as COO, and Alok is leading the entire effort as CEO.
Under their Technovative leadership, Bag2Bag is fast emerging as the leading travel tech startup that offers innovative accommodations and hospitality solutions. Alok shares, “We are a B2C company catering to the hospitality needs of all travellers by providing them with convenient stays.”
While Anurag adds, “We are currently operating from Bangalore in the state of Karnataka with over 30+ employees.”
And Gaurav says, “We offer accommodation in 100+ cities with 4500+ properties.”
Alok elaborates, “As a company, we focus on offering our users affordability, flexibility, and variety in their accommodations which is our USP. Our pay-by-hour rooms offer travelers budget-friendly stays. Having said that, people can also book our accommodations for longer durations of time, which can last up to a month. This shows flexibility in our services. Finally, we offer a wide range of accommodation options so people with different needs can all find their ideal stay.”
“We started our journey in 2019 by offering hourly rooms to travelers at an affordable price point,” says Anurag. Here, users can book any hotel room for the number of hours they desire and pay only for the hours they stay in that room. He adds, “Our flexible check-in and check-out policy have made that possible. This unique feature allowed us to establish ourselves in the hospitality industry and gain the support of over 200000 customers.”
However, Gaurav supplements, “We are determined to establish our footprints in different parts of India and have been working accordingly. After the success of short stays, we are now venturing into extended stays with multiple accommodation options.” Here, users view pre-discounted rates for daily, weekly, and monthly bookings, offering a side-by-side comparison.
Also, they believe that their plans to venture into food, beverages, and experiences will truly distinguish them from other hospitality companies. Alok claims that they always try to identify the real needs of people concerning their accommodation and work actively to improve it.
Anurag explains that they consider themselves an accommodation provider that targets the niche hospitality needs of travelers and offers helpful services in the unserved areas of the industry. As per Gaurav, all of these features have helped them position themselves as one of the best hospitality solution providers in the industry.
Carving Out a Distinctive Niche
Bag2Bag’s unique offerings make it stand out amidst the fierce competition. According to the trio, Bag2Bag is a relatively new startup in the hospitality industry, so from day one, they have been working on distinctively presenting themselves. While many online accommodation-providing companies have been established in this industry, Bag2Bag has managed to carve a niche quite different from its competitors’ offerings.
Alok says their offerings are divided into three major categories: short stay, extended stay, and experiences. “With short stays, our users can book hotel rooms for a few hours.” This is helpful for short trips such as business travel, medical travel, educational travel, or if you are stuck in a flight layover.
Similarly, according to Anurag, their extended stays are extremely useful as they offer various accommodation options, including hotels, homestays, service apartments, resorts, villas, cottages, and guesthouses. Guests can enjoy a stay in these establishments at pre-discounted rates and pay less to save more on longer stays.
Finally, Gaurav conveys that their experiences feature is a truly unique one that will launch soon and eventually help them stand out from other hospitality giants. He states, “We believe our offerings are unique and helpful, allowing us to stand out amidst the cutthroat competition in the hospitality industry.”
Alok furthers that while most of the big players in the industry are focused on making travel easy, “We are keener on improving the hospitality experience of our customers. We focus on offering a variety of accommodations options to our users that aren’t as widely explored.” Anurag informs, “We also offer pre-discounted rates for longer accommodation which users can view side-by-side for a fair comparison. Our platform is fairly easy to use, and all accommodation alternatives are displayed upfront for a smooth user experience.”
“We aren’t keen on venturing into providing flight bookings. Thus, we dive into the experience-related aspect of accommodation that includes travel activities and F&B. These features allow us to stand out from the competition and establish our niche in the industry,” reveals Gaurav.
For Your Convenience Only
Highlighting their professional values and qualities greatly admired by their clients, Alok says that they are a customer-centric company aimed at providing affordable, flexible, comfortable, and convenient services. “We are constantly working on finding innovative solutions to major issues faced by people in the hospitality industry. Keeping this in mind, we present our solutions in a user-friendly manner on our website and mobile application available on both android and iOS.”
Anurag says, “We greatly value transparency with our clients, so we take steps to build that trust with quality accommodation, services, and amazing deals. Thus customer-centric approach, innovative solutions, simplicity, and loyalty are our company values which we believe our clients admire and thus stay loyal to us.”
Apart from these values, Gaurav cites that their professional qualities also allow them to gain the trust and admiration of their clients. “For instance, we present our offerings so that our users can navigate our website and app easily. We divide our services into short stays, extended stays, and experiences so users can book accommodation as per the duration of their travel. Users can also book their type of accommodation easily as all the options are laid out upfront on our portals. Also, our carefully curated filters allow users to choose their accommodation according to their various needs such as locality, prices, user rating, star rating, facilities, and so on.”
Alok adds that along with their customers, they greatly value their property partners and work towards creating the best user experience. Their platform is fairly easy for them to use and organize their inventory. They also offer their partners great deals and various lucrative opportunities with Bag2Bag’s multiple services. Property owners can market their offerings under short stay with hourly rooms, under long stay with weekly and monthly bookings, and market their food, beverages, and other services under the experiences segment.
“Together with our values, features, and determination towards offering the best user experience, we have captured our users’ attention, and these are why our clients admire us the most,” believes Anurag.
Our Tech Advancement for Your Comfort
Being experienced leaders, they share their opinions on the impact of advancing techs like AI and ML on the hospitality industry and the way Bag2Bag is embracing the change. Gaurav explains that different types of customer and consumer data have been collected since the number of interactions increased via the internet. More and more people are using smartphones and the internet to browse and book hospitality offerings. AI and ML are increasingly adapting to these data and interaction points. “As a new company, we are starting to adapt these technologies for customer service and revenue management.” Depending on the type of offerings a company provides, AI and ML help in customer personalization, specific offerings, marketing, concierge, etc. These technologies are solving complex business problems, enabling providers to serve their customers better and customers to enjoy easy, fast, and personalized offerings.
Speaking about the challenges they face in the current scenario, Alok says that the hospitality industry is constantly evolving, “And we have to stay on our toes for the same.”
As a new company, there are numerous challenges Bag2Bag faces regularly. He remembers, “We entered the industry with a unique offering that took some time for people to get used to. Thus, initially, we met much resistance from hoteliers and customers.”
“We had to carefully navigate through these circumstances and provide a convincing explanation regarding the concerns of hoteliers regarding profitability, concerns of the general public regarding safety, affordability, and so on,” says Anurag.
“Also, we had to compete with other online accommodation-providing companies already established as giants in the hospitality industry. Keeping all this in mind, we had to present ourselves in a unique yet relatable way, so people feel welcome and intrigued enough to try our services,” expresses Gaurav.
Alok cites, “The recent pandemic wave is a great example of how we survived our biggest challenge. While the COVID-19 pandemic took a major toll on the hospitality industry, we managed to survive. This was because, initially, hoteliers were resistant to accepting our offer of hourly rooms. However, the drop in business due to the pandemic allowed them to open up to our offerings, and together we survived the pandemic by providing hourly rooms to travelers in need of accommodation.”
Your Stay: Our Hospitality
In their advice to budding entrepreneurs aspiring to venture into the Hospitality Solution space, Anurag says it is important to identify the unserved space in the hospitality industry and innovate products and solutions accordingly. Right product market fit is important. The market in India is big and keeps evolving, so it is important to have patience, keep doing your best in service, and stick to providing the best customer-friendly product and services. “Listen to customer’s and partner’s feedback which is very important to keep improving daily. There is no need to be afraid if bigger players enter or overlap. You deserve it if you do better in your niche,” adds Alok.
On envisioning scaling Bag2Bag’s operations and offerings in the future, Alok says that in the year 2023, they plan on growing their business by connecting with more accommodation providers to offer Bag2Bag’s customers an even wider range of stays. “We aim to establish more partnerships with hoteliers and accommodation providers in tier-1 and tier-2 cities, popular tourist destinations, commercial hotspots, booming IT hubs, and many more.”
“With this in mind, we hope to grow our business in every crevice of India and offer quality hotels, homestays, villas, resorts, service apartments, cottages, and guesthouses to our users traveling India,” says Anurag.
According to Gaurav, they are also planning on launching Bag2Bag’s F&B and experiences segment in 2023 on a broader scale. “With our F&B component, users will now be able to pre-book their meals while making reservations for their accommodations for a convenient and comfortable stay.”
“Along with this, our experiences segment will allow users to book various travel activities online such as tour guides, trekking, adventure sports, and so on, from the Bag2Bag platform. We hope these features will help us in scaling our company as well as revolutionizing the hospitality industry,” concludes Alok.
