MANCHESTER, England — Prism Founder and Group CEO Ritesh Agarwal isn't chasing hotel performance in his quest for growth.
Instead, the lead executive of Oyo Hotels' India-based parent firm wants to run a hotel company that's equal parts efficient and diverse across its brands and markets.
Prism, formerly Oravel Stays, has 28 brands ranging across all hospitality, from hotels to co-working spaces, villas, townhouses and apartment rentals to those coordinating weddings and events. Prism's hotel brands include Sunday Hotel and its original economy brand Oyo. Then, in December 2024, it acquired G6 Hospitality and its Motel 6 and Studio 6 brands from Blackstone Real Estate for $525 million.
Now Prism is on the move across the United Kingdom and Europe, and it is actively looking to move its hotel offerings up the segment chain. Speaking at the Annual Hotel Conference, Agarwal said the U.K. hospitality market has challenges but also opportunities.
“We are not looking to underwrite significant [revenue per available room] growth or pricing growth. We are just looking to underwrite … complexity and higher cost structures, looking to make things more efficient, and the U.K. is a great place to do that," he said.
The more a hotel moves up in segmentation, the more savings there are in every single line item, Agarwal said. A company such as his, which started arguably as a tech startup, is ideally suited to own, manage or distribute such properties, he added.
“Our value proposition has expanded. We started as distribution, then revenue management and a software company, with some branded value. Now we do hard hotels … and we do management,” he said. “As an outcome of that, we continuously pushed ourselves by keeping the same technology, operating platform and management.
"We’ve gone from Oyo in the super-budget category, we bought Motel 6 and Studio 6 from Blackstone. … [And] we also of course launched Sunday Hotels, our four-star-ish, upscale brand, and that is, if I get it right, 39 or 40 hotels here in the U.K. where we want to establish institutional property ownership groups where we become the brand-management company, operator and various other things.”
It's not uncommon for hospitality companies with hotels spread across multiple markets to utilize different property management software, customer relationship platforms, revenue management and booking systems, and reputation management systems, Agarwal said.
“A lot of [those platforms and systems] don’t talk to each other, which leads to leakage. … If you have a single [technology] stack, it is easier,” he said.
In the U.K., Wales is Prism’s biggest market, with Welsh capital Cardiff its biggest city. The company's next largest U.K. market is Manchester. Prism also has more than 30 Sunday Hotels in Germany.
“We do not deny that we are today in many places. [We are] partners, competitors and collaborators with traditional hospitality,” he said, adding the company's focus is most definitely on driving more direct bookings.
Owner relations and tech
Prism aspires to expand its hotel product in the upscale and upper-upscale segments, Agarwal said. Another one of Prism's priorities is to cultivate relationships with the hotel owner community, he added.
“We work with two kinds of hotel owners. … Hotels and aparthotels, and institutional and individual landlords. … We have found more success working with institutional owners, and the big reason for that is that they appreciate the value of having a balance sheet like ours … over nine months of last year, which is public, close to $200 million-plus of” earnings before interest, taxes, distribution and amortization, he said.
Working with individual hoteliers and properties takes longer, but even there Prism is gaining momentum, Agarwal said. Prism's partners are looking for hands-on companies such as his who they believe reach “just the right pace that brings in guest-to-cashflow ratio … and creates more asset value.”
“Consumer distribution creates value. … There is a niche out there of many smaller distributors, which would be a lot of work for an individual owners to connect, to manage pricing, to yield, to select and so on.”
In recent years, Agarwal has had to explain to hotel owners that Prism is not solely focused on the Oyo brand, but he added most people have been receptive due to the firm’s success in the past.
“We built up our mobile app. We had 100 million users, and every month we’ve seen millions of customers book with us. A lot of hotel-ownership groups went from owning the dirt, the land, the buildings and then built the brand and management. We came exactly from the other way around. We went from booking to the technology to the management to the brand,” he said. “My view is that [a hotel] should be on many shelves, but [Prism’s] shelf must be the nicest looking and prettiest shelf so that people come to us more than others.”
Artificial intelligence can help, but there's still a gulf between guests and this new tech, Agarwal said. Instead, he's more interested in how AI can help improve hotel operations and make data more accessible.
“AI looks at booking in a very different way to consumers, who focus on images, emotions, other humans … AI wants structured data of the last 100 reviews, the background of who those guests are, why they chose [your hotel], and why they did not,” he said.