OpenRooms Introduced to the Public, Feature the "Last Minute Booking" Feature

The hotel booking application BukaKamar introduces itself to the public for the first time, even though the product is not yet ready to accept bookings. This service is here to accommodate the needs of travelers and business people who need direct and spontaneous hotel bookings.

CEO OpenRoom Bobby Haryadi said, the new official application live on Google Play as of today (18/10). However, his party deliberately has not entered the hotel room inventory into the application in order to ensure the readiness of the application with a more perfect interface.

By business agreement, BukaKamar has partnered with 15 hotels spread across Jakarta, Bali, Bandung, Surabaya, Makassar, Palembang, Pekanbaru, and Solo.

For monetization, the company takes a commission from each booking that happened. Open Room operations are still being carried out bootstrapping. The team consisted of six people, including Bobby himself.

"Today is an introduction to the public first. The plan is that starting Monday (22/10) we will start slowly entering hotel room inventory into the application," he said.

Featured Features of OpenRoom

For superior features last minute booking, users can book rooms within a maximum period of 14 days in advance. The discount that users get from this feature is claimed to be lower than the normal price, around 15%-25%.

Other features are local rates. Within a 5 km radius of the user's reach, when booking a room they will get an additional 10% discount.

All of these features are expected to provide added value for travelers and business people to use BukaKamar. Especially in big cities like Jakarta, Bandung, and Surabaya, more than 60% on average booking 1-5 days in advance.

"So in principle, it's better to give a discount than reduce hotel occupancy. Because in the industry hospitality If an empty room is the same as a loss because other costs are still running, such as electricity, employee salaries, and so on."

Whole booking, he continued, can only be done through the application. The desktop site can only be accessed by hotel partners to control room management. Currently, the application for the Open Room is only available on the Android platform.

Going forward, BukaKamar is targeted to capture 1000 rooms from hotel partners. It is hoped that this target can be realized no later than January 2019.

Bobby said that the target will be achieved by attracting hotel chains that already have many branches and rooms throughout Indonesia. In that way, you can quickly Open Kamar can acquire rooms in a short time.

"The more hotel rooms we can acquire, of course, the better it will be for users because they can have many choices," he concluded.