Singapore’s online hotel booking site RedDoorz targets Southeast Asia push
- Budget hotel booking platform targets domestic travel in Southeast Asia
- RedDoorz estimates it can reach 1 million occupied room nights by December
RedDoorz founder and chief executive Amit Saberwal describes his four-year-old budget hotel online booking start-up as a “combination of Uber and Marriott”.
The Singapore-based firm is like Uber Technologies in the sense that the hotels listed on its app are owned by individual proprietors, just like many drivers own their cars and pick up bookings through the US ride-hailing giant. It is like Marriott International, the American hotel chain operator and franchiser, on the hospitality side because it helps take care of finding customers for the owners, according to Saberwal.
“For consumers, doubt will always exist whether the independent hotel is of good quality,” he said in an interview in Hong Kong last month. “With RedDoorz, there’s the guarantee of a nice, clean room with Wi-fi, safe and comfortable, functional, utilitarian, so that the guest can get on with the next day refreshed. We don’t overpromise.”
Unlike international hotel chains, though, RedDoorz focuses on the domestic travel market in Southeast Asia, where it currently covers Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore. The company plans to enter Thailand and Malaysia next. The average room rate on RedDoorz is about US$20 a night.
