Last Minute Keys (LMK) is an online marketplace that enables hotels to sell off their unsold inventory and helps customers to get quality hotels at rates & deals that are unmatched in the hotel industry.
Last Minute Keys offers the hotels a cutting edge extranet platform, through which the hoteliers can liquidate their last minute inventory dynamically based on supply & demand. Customers on the other hand, land up getting a great deal at the last minute, hence making it a win-win situation for all.
In an interaction with Sujata Sangwan of BWDisrupt, LMK’s team shares details about the company.
Idea GenerationIts interesting how the idea came up. The Co Founder & CEO of LMK, Manoj Gursahani travels frequently to the US. One of his trips to the US was pretty spontaneous and hence he had landed in New york without any hotel reservations. While he was hunting for hotels on his arrival at JFK, he was recommended a last minute travel app by one of his colleagues. He was taken by surprise, as he managed to get the hotel desired by him at 50% of the price he usually pays for a well planned advance reservation, that too by booking the hotel room with utmost convenience, while he was in cab heading towards the city center.
He realised that whenever he had any unplanned travel in India , he had always landed up paying a premium on last minute tariffs, even though an average of 40 % of the hotel rooms throughout India go unsold due to excess supply of rooms.
Hence we identified the opportunity of creating a unique last minute hotel booking platform, in order to facilitate the hotels in India to sell off their unsold inventory & for customers to avail the highly discounted last minute deals.
Unique key pointsWe have a focused dynamic platform for hotels to liquidate their inventory for today, tomorrow & day after on a real time basis, which is not available with other OTA's.
Viz a viz our competitors & other last minute players in the market who have integrated API's of other online portals & have merely just positioned themselves as last minute players, we have actually managed one on one contracts with each and every hotel who are listed on our platform. Hence we have the best rates available in the market, as hotels have the flexibility to control & change their rates every minute via our platform.
We consistently monitor our rates & maintain rate comparative analysis with other OTA's. At times we offer deals that are more than 50% cheaper than our competitors. Hence we have a huge rate advantage, since we get great deals from hotels , as they sell their unsold inventory at rock bottom rates on our platform.
DifferentiationUnlike the other last minute players in the market that have either integrated API's of other online portals & have merely just positioned themselves as last minute players, Last Minute Keys have one on one contracts with each and every hotel that are listed listed on their platform.
Currently Last Minute Keys has tied up with more than 450 hotels in 13 cities (Mumbai, Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Jaipur, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Kochi, Chennai & Goa) & plans to expand to more than 750 hotels by end of December 2016.
Funding Status and Monetization ModelLast Minute Keys is currently self funded and is looking to raise funds for further expansion. The current monetization or revenue model is via commissions from our hotel partners. We will also look at priority hotel listing & ad revenues in the future.
As per Traxcn, $8 bn has been globally invested in online travel in 2015~16 with Horizontal and Accommodation being the top funded sectors.
Challenges FacedCurrently the cost per acquisition per customer is fairly high in the B2C space. Hence we have started developing a login based web based platform for Corporates & Travel agents, whereby it will be far easier to acquire customers cost effectively & at a much rapid pace. We will be launching our web interface by end of December 2016.
Traction Details We have a combined following of 8000+ User out of which 2000+are using our App. We are getting 400+ Monthly sessions and people are looking for great deals.We have some transactions and the customer feedbacks have been great. This is giving us a great motivation about the future.
Expansion PlansCurrently Last Minute Keys (LMK) is tied up with more than 450 hotels in 13 cities ( Mumbai,New Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Jaipur, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Chennai, Kochi & Goa ) & plans to expand to 750 hotels in over 30 cities in India by end of December 2016.
Expansion & Customer acquisition through API integrations :A) Once we have established a footprint in the Indian market, we will go international via API integrations with international last minute hotel players. By integrating with these players, we will expand our supply to more than 300 international cities worldwide & on the other hand the international last minute players would also start selling LMK hotels in India to there customers. Currently the international last minute players do not have a presence in any Indian cities.
B) We will integrate with retail e-commerce market places, to sell last minute hotel deals.
C) Last but not the least, integration with app based taxi aggregators, which are one of the most crucial touch-points to cater to unplanned & spontaneous customers looking out for hotels at the last minute.
Scaling up Technology : Currently we are present on Android & are also launching our B2B/ B2C web model by end of December 2016. Post funding we will develop IOS as well. We will also facelift our current android app interface to match the latest designs & tech trends. Missing features like loyalty wallets etc will be incorporated.
Customer acquisition through a B2B model :Travel agents : We will offer our web based platform to Travel agents, along with offering attractive commissions, as customer acquisition & transactions through this route will be the most cost effective medium & the fastest as well, as a major chunk of hotel rooms are sold through travel agents.
Corporates : We will offer our web solution to HR's & the admins of Sme's & Corporates. We will lure them with attractive loyalty programs to generate customer loyalty.
Introduction of day use & night use room tariff's :We will introduce day use & night use tariffs for customers, who intend to use hotels for a day use only or a night use only.
Day use slots : 10am – 7 pm
Night use slots : 9pm – 8 am
This model fits in perfectly with our last minute hotel rooms model.
Marketing PlansAs the Travel industry has rapidly adapted the Online Mediums, we as online platform is using all the digital medium to reach out to our target audience. Right from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing we are using all the mediums. We are waiting for our website to be listed on price competition website where we will be making a massive difference because we are beating competition by 30% or more on same properties.
Market Size and OpportunityAs per analysis by Google India, the current market size is estimated to reach 1.8 Billion dollars by end of 2016 from 0.8 billion in 2015.
As per analysis by Google India , 8.4 million Indians are likely to book hotels by end of 2016 up from 3.5 million in 2014.
Online hotel bookings is one of the least penetrated segments within the travel category in India.
While 70 % of the hotels in Europe & 35-40% of the hotels in America are booked online, the online bookings in India only account for 16 % of the total hotel bookings, hence leaving a huge scope of growth.
Also the growing number of tech savvy millennials & SME segment offer a huge scope of growth.
