Original post by Shilpa Phadnis via The Time of India
BANGALORE: Ritesh Agarwal launched Oravel.com, an aggregator of bed & breakfasts and serviced apartments in Delhi, in April this year. The portal facilitates guests and hosts to meet online and place bookings for different kinds of accommodation.
But Agarwal soon faced challenges in scaling his hotel footprint.”I was finding it difficult to build the operational end of the business,” says the 18-year-old college dropout. He even had trouble attracting senior talent from the industry.
To his luck, he ran into Venture Nursery, a startup accelerator, in May. Venture Nursery took him through an intense mentoring session for two months that helped him get the formal structure of the business in place. “The mentors in the accelerator programme helped me document the operational manual and the mission statement. I was able to brush up my marketing strategy, and hence was able to grow the inventory from 30 to 3,500 properties,” he says. He also roped in Manish Sinha, the owner of boutique bed & breakfast property Cinnamon Stays, as co-founder of Oravel.com.
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