Hospitality and travel-tech startup Oyo, formally known as Oravel Stays Ltd, on Friday announced the appointment of Shreerang Godbole as the company’s chief service officer, and Shirish Damani as its chief revenue officer as a part of Oyo’s efforts to optimize its service technology to bolster revenue generation, it said in a release.
Godbole has been working as the senior vice president of the consumer product segment, while Damani leads the revenue function at the startup’s Oyo Vacation Homes vertical.
“Having conceptualized the playbooks for core functions at Oyo, these leaders will work on further growing the company’s business across the world,” Oyo said.
In his new role, Godbole will be responsible for improving the service and experience offered to IPO-bound Oyo’s clients, including both its patrons as well as customers. He will lead the company’s Consumer Service and Partner Service Product teams as the startup’s chief service officer.
Damani’s particular role as the chief revenue officer would be building a “revenue-first, tech-forward, customer-centric approach” at Oyo. His additional duties shall include heading the Consumer Product team and improving Oyo’s website and mobile application.
The IPO-bound tech startup recently faced a jolt as one of its largest investors, SoftBank Group Corp cut Oyo’s valuation by about 20% in its books, dragging the company’s valuation to around $6.5 billion in the private market.
This comes even as Oyo declared narrower losses and sales rebound for the period up to June 2022, in an addendum to its IPO filing submitted last month. The company’s financials were buoyed by a rebound in travel and tourism, the key revenue drivers for Oyo.
The Gurugram-based startup founded by Ritesh Agarwal also pushed its public listing plans to December from September earlier, and is still in a wait-and-watch mode for market conditions to remain conducive to the public offering. It delayed the listing last month owing to a lower valuation as against the earlier planned figure of about $11 billion.
The SoftBank-backed company says it is focusing on markets including India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Europe, offering over 40 integrated products and solutions to patrons operating about 157,000 properties in 35 countries in these regions.
As a measure to expand its Europe operations, the hospitality major also acquired Direct Booker for $5.5 million, which manages over 3,200 vacation homes in Croatia.
