Oyo enters into a strategic partnership with China's Ctrip

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China's leading online travel agency (OTA) Ctrip has entered into a strategic agreement with Softbank-backed Oyo, to collaborate and generate demand by providing access to customers of both brands in China. The move follows after Ctrip acquired Naspers' stake in MakeMyTrip.

"Our multi-brand strategy enables us to meet the needs of every type of traveller and this partnership with Ctrip gives us an opportunity to extend our offerings to millions of discerning Chinese travellers looking for standardised, quality offerings," said Sam Shih, COO at Oyo China.

As the country’s second-largest hotel chain, Oyo is looking at the exceptional reach that Ctrip enjoys as China’s largest OTA, to steer travellers to 10,000 of our hotels across 320 cities, he added.

Under the partnership, Oyo will work with Ctrip in helping asset owners across multiple areas, including providing marketing support and greater visibility online, improving and upskilling the talent pool, harnessing technology, improving customer traffic to the hotel’s listing and streamlining operations with respect to bookings generated from Ctrip.

Across China, Oyo Jiudian (Hotels), has over 450,000 exclusive rooms in 10,000 hotels.

"With Ctrip being the largest OTA in the country, with over 300 million registered members, we are aiming to build a multi-dimensional full-service value chain covering every aspect of travel. This partnership between the two giants will add value to China’s hospitality landscape by empowering both the demand and supply side. This will also boost existing consumption in the industry, enhance the size of the consumption opportunity in the market and upgrade the consumption patterns of  China’s hospitality industry as well," said Maninder Gulati, global chief strategy officer, Oyo.

Last month, Nasdaq-listed MakeMyTrip announced a change in the company's shareholding basis as Naspers and Ctrip International entered into a share exchange transaction agreement. Naspers exchanged its entire shareholding in MakeMyTrip for newly issued shares of Ctrip and Ctrip acquired Naspers' shareholding in MakeMyTrip.