By Devansh Pandey
Disclaimer: This article does not discriminate on the basis of gender and only provide factual information for readers.
The Pandemic has stayed with us for a long time now and has had bad impacts on some of the best industries in the world. Has anyone thought which are the worst industries to be hit by this pandemic? The simple answer to this is Travel, Tourism and Hospitality. Yes, they are interrelated but have also seen a huge amount of change in the past few years.
In today’s article let’s talk about a few men who proudly stand as one of the best entrepreneurs our country has ever had and have brought in quite a reform in their respective industries. The interesting part of this article would be the reasons how their minds were struck with such great ideas all out of frustration and necessity.
Let's start in order then:
1. Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati- OLA Cabs
Before Ola came into existence, we all remember using autos and Meru Cabs to go to the airport, outstations or even the nearby mall, but Ola has made lives so much easier. With just a few clicks you can have a taxi waiting for you at your door.
It all started when Bhavish Aggarwal (CEO of Ola) was travelling from Bangalore to Bandipur( a forest area in Karnataka) and had booked a taxi all for himself.
source- officechai.com
Everything was smooth and fine until the taxi driver decided to play some foul games with Bhavish.
He stopped right in the middle of the jungle and asked Bhavish to pay twice the fare of what was earlier decided. Bhavish decided not to agree with him and walked all by himself back to Bangalore in the middle of the night.
On that very day, he decided to put an end to the arrogance of these taxi drivers and also bring a sense of uniformity and discipline in the daily transport industry.
Everything was done manually first. They made a website, got the bookings through it and directly contacted drivers to reach out to the customers.
And the result was seen in a few years. With Ankit Bhati, the man behind all the tech, Ola was all set to be a Flying Unicorn Startup. All manual operations have now turned technical.
Earlier taxis had to be booked well in advance through travel agents or direct contact, but the entry of Ola in the market changed the entire industry. Not only are the customers happy with what they are getting but also the drivers because they are now working under a single BRAND.
In India, Ola is already a market leader in the industry not letting Uber to take its place. The company is growing so much that they even acquired FoodPanda to throw Uber Eats out of the way. The company now operates in more than 160 cities across countries like the UK, New Zealand etc. With many more business models in their mind, they are still in the improvement stage, they are launching new services like portable toilets which are booked by their mobile apps, digital payments system called OlaMoney, etc.
2. Phanindra Sama- Redbus.com
This man calls himself an “Incidental Entrepreneur”.
Why?
The story begins when Phanindra wanted to go home to Hyderabad during the time of Diwali. He asked all travel agents in Bangalore for just one seat on a bus to reach home to his family.
source-livemint.com
After spending the entire day travelling from one travel agent to another, he realized how inefficient the travel industry was, especially the road transport industry. He knew that there would have been some seat which would have been empty but due to lack of live tracking of the seats, he was the one who suffered and could not reach home at Diwali that year.
That day he realized that he was going to do something about it, he created a software (BOSS) for bus operators for free but that failed because most of the bus operators and drivers were uneducated. He felt that this industry requires something easy, which even a child could understand. He met Sanjay Anandaram, his mentor whom he promises to remember his entire life. Then he understood that once he has the customers, the bus operators and travel agents will listen to him, but the software should have an easy user interface too.
We say 'Customer is King', and that is what made Phanindra the king of the bus travel industry. He got the customers through his website ( Redbus.com) and started the process. Again, here also, everything was done manually first, then through SMS and finally the Mobile App.
Now you want to travel to any place by bus, Redbus would be the first thing that would come to your mind.
The company gained new heights and hence Phanindra decided to sell it to Goibibo.
3. Riteish Aggarwal- Oyo Rooms
A little boy who had heard the word "entrepreneur" at the age of 8 from his elder sister went crazy about it. He belonged to a small village in Orissa where he said that the literacy rate would have been around 30%. He attended entrepreneurship seminars where he would sit and listen very interestingly.
Riteish loved to travel in his teenage. In his college first year he claims to have travelled 200 places without his parents knowing about it and due to his passion for travel and exploring unseen places, he always thought of saving that one extra penny even if it meant staying in a free hotel room.
He understood where the problem lied. All small independent hotels lacked customer base and because of no customers, these hotels were in extremely poor condition.
So what he basically did was that he standardized the low budget hotels, ones which were lying around in the cities with no revenue. All the hotels he acquired or partnered with came under a single brand name “OYO” which further was marketed through heavy advertisements and technology.
Another important change he brought with OYO was that now all hotels did not have a fixed price at which rooms and services were sold but now their prices fluctuated as per the market conditions and demand.
The biggest advantage of OYO got was that the customers got exactly what they had seen in pictures. So OYO’s customers could trust them and be assured that there will be no compromise in the quality of rooms and service.
The company has expanded in both terms, the markets in which they operate as well as their new business models like OYO Weddingz and OYO foods.
These industries have gone through the Pandemic in a very calm way and now they seem to get back to work slowly. However these “New Businessmen” did not lose hope during the Pandemic and stood firmly with their companies sailing their ships out calmly during the storm.
Riteish says “ When the storms hit the seas, the fishermen sit home and strengthen their nets” which has a very strong meaning behind it.
source- CNBC.com
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