From Oberoi to Oyo

Chitra Narayanan is a Delhi-based journalist who keeps an interested gaze on consumer behaviour. She is currently an editorial consultant with The Hindu Business Line, and in her two-and-a half-decade-long journalistic career has had stints with BW Businessworld, Business Today, Economic Times and Business Standard. She has also written for the Mint and Telegraph. She has written widely on marketing strategy, workplaces, travel and hospitality. A lover of crime fiction and a fan of P.G. Wodehouse, she would love to write an old-world mystery with a hotel as a setting.

A captivating account of innovations, disruptions and challenges that define the Indian hotel industry.

How did the Taj, the Oberoi and the ITC hotels come to dominate the Indian hotel landscape? What are the challenges thrown by the disrupters-the foreign chains, OYO, the online travel agents and the young start-ups? What does the future hold?

This book answers these and many more such questions.

Based on the author's years of observation of the industry and interactions with key stakeholders, this book takes you through the tumultuous history and evolution of the Indian hotel industry. It also captures the enormous shifts and changes including guest preferences, consumer profiles and disruptions brought in by technology. Packed with some exciting profiles and analysis of strategies, it also attempts to provide a glimpse of what lies in store for the future.

We have all stayed in hotels and have discussed our experiences in hotels animatedly in social groups. Chitra has written a gem of a book that traces the origins of the hospitality industry from the big three----Tatas, Oberois and ITC----to the international chain entry and to the rise of the Indian entrepreneur.
This is a book that gives a fascinating insight into the branding, the experience, the segmentation of each of the players. The segmentation from experiences around sleep, food and internet to the role of the coffee shop, the décor , location etc. this industry has pioneered diversity and inclusion with the recruitment of the LGBT community in one chain and the specially-abled people in another chain. This book is an excellent compilation of the history, the people and the strategies that make up the hospitality sector, it is a riveting read!!

Chitra Narayanan's deeply researched and reported book gives us the fascinating history as well as a glimpse of the future of the hospitality industry. From the first proper hotel that came up in Calcutta to the of OYO, which has attracted enormous funding and expanded faster than any other chain in history, she takes a look at how the industry works, the business models, the personalities behind the success and failure of the hotel chains, and the ongoing wars for supremacy. Chitra has managed to accomplish the difficult task of writing a book that both provides enormous business insight as well as a fast paced and colourful tale of the history and evolution of the Indian hospitality industry from pre-Independence to the current era of online aggregators, shared travel apps, and mergers and acquisitions as every hotelier chases scale.