OYO Rooms ties up with Airtel for wi-fi, DTH services

New Delhi: OYO Rooms Wednesday announced a tie-up with Bharti Airtel, under which the telecom major will provide its wi-fi and DTH services in OYO branded hotels, initially covering 3,000 rooms within the next three months.

"OYO being the largest branded network of hotels in India, is very keen to have Airtel on board to provide DTH and seamless wi-fi experience for our guests across more than 3,500 properties we have on our platform," OYO Rooms Chief Operating Officer Abhinav Sinha told PTI.

He said this is an exclusive long-term strategic pact with Airtel.

"We have about 30,000 rooms already on our platform. The first phase which is already in the launch phase is going to cover 3,000 rooms," Sinha said.

OYO Rooms network hotels provide TV and wi-fi experience, but the experience is broken because they have not used larger players, especially Airtel being one of the best, Sinha said.

Talking about capital expenditure for deploying wi-fi and DTH services, Sinha said wi-fi premise equipments are already a part of the hotel.

"If they need to be enhanced our estimate is 10-15 percent of the hotels that OYO is working closely with them to get it done. The hotel owners are more than happy to invest to improve customer experience. For the DTH connections, just like several other plans Airtel already has prepared a custom plan for us," Sinha said.

Bharti Airtel CEO for Corporate Business, Ashish Arora said: "We are looking at rolling out services within a quarter across 3,000 rooms as the first phase and once the model is settled it will look at connecting all the properties under the OYO Rooms umbrella."