According to founder and group CEO Ritesh Agarwal, the travel software company Oyo saw a record 4.5 lakh or more reservations on New Year’s Eve, its biggest bookings per hotel per day for India in the previous five years.
Agarwal discussed the “busiest day of the year” for the travel technology startup in a series of tweets, revealing that Varanasi had more Oyo reservations than Goa.
“Over 450k-plus bookings were made on this New Year’s Eve globally. This is 35% more than last year. We are also seeing the highest bookings per hotel per day for India in the last five years,” Agarwal tweeted.
The year 2022 saw a dramatic increase in travel and tourism. While business and cultural travel has greatly boosted the industry in India, leisure travel has been driving the travel recovery curve globally.
“Bookings from Goa are rising by the hour. But guess the city that is overtaking Goa? Varanasi,” Agarwal said in a tweet.
Additionally, he provided data from Oyo’s annual Travelopedia 2022 trends index, which revealed that small towns are experiencing the largest rise in reservations.
In 2022, Uttar Pradesh overtook California as the state with the most visitors, per Oyo’s data. The largest rise in bookings was seen in smaller towns and cities including Hathras, Srinagar, Sasaram, Karaikudi, and Tenali in 2022 compared to 2021.
Agarwal stated the following when discussing the general increase in activity on New Year’s eve, “Over 1 million people were looking to book on Oyo’s app & website. The price changes on our app have gone up to 12.7 million times”.
