YoHo Bed Co-Founder, Hifnaz Jiffrey said that YoHo Bed aims to integrate their business into the irBnB application. Jiffrey was speaking as a panelist at Disrupt Asia at the Nelum Pokuna on 12 October. Deputly Lead Digital AirBnB, Rachel Bartholomeusz and Head of Destination Marketing Asia Pacific, Sarah Mathews also spoke on the panel.
Jiffrey said, “60 percent of our bookings come from our mobile application. Our vision for our mobile application is that basically, you cannot just book your hotel, but completely book your entire experience. What AirBnB would do on the global scale, we are going to do in the local scale and probably integrate with AirBnB.”
“We have understood local paint points. If you look at the pricing in the sector we operate in, most people doing their pricing is by gut feel or by competitors. There is no scientific reason to the pricing. We built a data driven approach for pricing. We looked at the airline industry and worked on demand and supply.”
“With local regulations, local hoteliers are unable to precharge the customer. Imagine a 20 room hotel in December and a particular customer has booked 8 rooms. There is no way the hotelier could precharge. The only way he could do so is after the customer had come and physically given him the card. We spoke to the banks as a hotel chain representing them and
through technology, we pre charge the customer based on a certain timeline. If it is a Colombo hotel, you would pre charge 2 days, but an expensive villa at about 14 days.”
Bartholomeusz said that AirBnB felt it was important to localize their service. “The product is localized. In China, our interface is run through the WeChat app. We are not known as the AirBnB app. The AirBnB look is different in every market. We have recently brought in Arabic that brought a whole heap of challenges.”
“All that content needs to be shot for mobile. We no longer shoot for a TV Commercial and chuck that on our social media.”
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