A room at your fingertips

Living in the IT capital or being in the IT field is easy, especially when you know that travelling between cities is a huge part of the job. Besides, it’s also not that easy to get a hotel booking whenever one has to travel.

Thanks to three college friends, Harsha Nallur, Mohsin Dingankar and Animesh Chaudhary, who hop in and out of Bengaluru frequently, one can easily book a hotel for their stay after they land in a particular city. Harsha, one of the founders, says, “Due to various projects, a company runs, it’s not surprising if your boss asks you to pack your bag in a couple of hours and head to the next city for a meeting. The last thing you want to worry about at this point is a hotel. That’s where we come into place.” Finding solution to this is the iOS and Android app ‘HotelsAroundYou’ which was launched in 2014. Currently, the app includes various hotels from Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai and Delhi, but they are hoping to launch few other cities along with holiday destinations.

Being in the IT field themselves, the founders knew the problems faced those in the similar field. They were in the situation themselves before they decided to develop the app. “We all became busy with work after we finished our engineering. We travelled a lot during that time and it was always a difficult task to get a last minute hotel booking. There was an incident wherein one person known to us had booked the room in advance only to realise that the hotel did not have a record of the booking when he reached there. It took about two hours to finally get a room,” says Harsha. This experience was the Eureka moment for them to realise that while existing services have made life easier for people, there were several gaps to be filled.

One of the advantages of the app is their categorisation of hotels. They list only quality hotels so one does not have to go through hundreds of them before making a decision. It also makes it easier for people as the team features limited hotels on any given day, segregated by location and price point. When they started with the venture, they made several appointments with hotels but very few took them seriously. Today, they have a tie-up with more than 350 hotels and about 20,000 users of the app. Harsha adds, “We’ve been getting a great response from people so far and it’s been wonderful. We hope to improve our service and expand to several other cities to give the users what they deserve.”