Skift Take
What’s happening with Oyo cannot be looked at separately from the modern Indian milieu that gave birth to it, and in which it operates. Oyo now needs to rise above that legacy and bring in the global business practices that ensure it survives and thrives in the future.
There’s a lot to cheer for in Oyo’s rise in the hospitality industry and on the global stage. I have been rooting for Oyo from the start, especially for its ambition to be the first global Indian travel brand in the internet era. As an Indian, I really want to see Oyo succeed on the global stage.
In what seems like a blink, the company has become ubiquitous — and highly visible — across the world’s most populous regions such as India and China, and with that comes a level of scrutiny that is surprising to no one except the company’s management and its major funder SoftBank.
With that scrutiny, also in a blink, it has become a pariah and a cautionary tale of SoftBank-funded excess, à la WeWork of the hospitality world.
While that is certainly one part of the explanation of what is happening with Oyo, it’s also a very simplistic, culturally devoid point of view. When The New York Times published a detailed story on Oyo on January 2, reporting on a series of questionable practices by the company and its staff — inflated room numbers, inflated fee to hotel franchisees, unlicensed hotels, blatant corruption from staff, illegal nexus with police — looking at these separate from the Indian social context would be missing the full story.
To really understand Oyo, the polarizing emotions it elicits from rivals and friends alike, its growth troubles and layoffs as reported by us at Skift the last few months and other media, you really have to understand the bewilderingly complex milieu that gave birth to Oyo, the modern, muscular, instantly modern India.
The story of
