Pros
The base salaries were above industry average
Cons
Too many to mention but the law-breaking took the biscuit. Changing contracts without informing business partners (hotel owners), not paying staff bonuses (a contractual obligation), missing payroll (twice whilst I was there), not refunding dissatisfied guests when it was well within their statutory rights (illegal), lacking any tech solution because their product and tech team is made up of also-rans and they lie about having anything innovative (despite pitching itself as a tech company), constantly changing strategic direction and being reactive without properly responding to the market. Hotels were operating against basic health and safety standards (illegal in the UK) and nepotism was rife with favours done to line the pockets of senior management tantamount to fraud. Increases in occupancy levels never materialised - you simply cannot increase occupancy in the UK and USA and other ex-Asia markets using OYO's room rate reduction policy so OYO stood to profit off of hotelier's backs by instituting charges for every room sold via its channels which it forced to supercede existing ones - a bait and switch whereby they tried to take existing guests and then charge hotels the pleasure of having them book via their site. Ritesh Agarwal has been caught lying time and time again and/or embellishing KPIs - take a look at his interview on CNBC's Squawk Alley where the presenter, Seema Mody, vetoed every last one of his rehearsed PR talking points with embarrassing ease. For example, consolidated losses increased in 2019 but Ritesh tried to pretend that OYO's net losses reduced without giving a wider context to reflect the truer picture of a worsening horizon regarding profit. Another lie he told the media - which was picked up - was about the use of machine learning to increase conversion rates where tests were not even carried out to see if this claim was true. But perhaps the worst lie the CEO and company have told regards churn rate of hotels which they claim is less than 1%: this is simply not true. Many of the hotels the sales teams sign to contract with OYO cancel within a very short period of time having cottoned on to their ploy and not all those advertised on the company's site are available via OYO in order to inflate numbers. In summary: don't work here, don't stay at their 'hotels' and don't give them your hotel to run.
