Calcutta, May 29: Online travel agency Cleartrip has invested an undisclosed amount in city-based start-up iManageMyHotel, which provides management solutions to mid-sized budget hotels.
"Cleartrip wanted us to take our product to the next level and to help them generate business in the process, too. Hence, besides product development, we are using that fund for sales and marketing and for ramping up our infrastructure," said Sourav Goswami, founder and CEO of iManageMyHotel.
The hotel solutions company was part of the Nasscom 10,000 start-up programme in Calcutta last year.
"Cleartrip as a business is expanding and has over 25,000 hotels on its platform. However, many of them are small and mid-sized hotels that are not technologically sophisticated and cannot manage their inventory on a real-time basis. So, we brought iManageMyHotels on board," Aditya Agarwal, head of corporate strategy at Cleartrip Pvt Ltd, told The Telegraph.
The start-up, that began operations in 2014, caters to hotels with the number of rooms ranging between 10 and 50 and currently has over 200 hotels on board.
The cloud-based iManageMyHotels software allows hoteliers to manage their entire reservation process from different sources, such as online travel agencies, offline travel agents and corporates. This helps the owner to see the updates from anywhere.
"What is unique about this software is that it works offline as well and the data is synced whenever it is connected to the Internet. This design has been brought in for hotels in remote areas with poor connectivity," said Goswami.
The company charges hotels for monthly subscriptions and the amount depends on the number of rooms in a hotel. The price range varies between Rs 2,000 and Rs 5,000 per month.
Besides Cleartrip, the start-up is working with other online travel agencies, such as MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, Desiya, Expedia,Via. "Our software helps in keeping track of the purchase, stock and issuance of hotel rooms in real time for all our registered clients. This allows them to manage the availability of rooms on their websites and keep customers updated accordingly," explained Goswami.
iManageMyHotels is now looking to raise another round of funds worth $1 million.
