IHR the leading online travel portal cum hotel booking engine, known for transparent bookings and no frills packages has introduced the concept of putting photographs of hotels in their booking engine. According to Mr. Ankit Rastogi, the business head of Indiahotelreview.com, adding the photographs based on the actual conditions is an effort towards making IHR the largest and most transparent in its genre.
Ankit says IHRs initiative of carrying photographs of hotels in its website is a bit different from the usual cozy images of hotel accommodation you see in the portals of the Big Bosses of the online travel. There is a dearth of authentic photographs and this is especially true for budget hotels in tire 2- 3 cities of India. Nobody cares about the B grade hotels which directly impacts middle class budget travelers in India. Our end goal is to provide these set of travelers with genuine photographs so that they know in advance what to expect with their limited budget.
IHR is a leader among online OTAs for at least 60 to 80 cities in India, including many in south and west which are essentially weekend destinations. This means they are visited by regular crowds every weekend and very different from a honeymoon trip. So here the onus of responsibility falls squarely on IHR and any kind of misrepresentation can be pointed out very easily. Stresses Ankit.
He further added the images of the hotel rooms are based on the actual conditions and is neither supplied by the hotel owners nor doctored in anyway for make over. The images mainly consist of the most essential part which decides a stay namely the room quality, bathrooms and the appearance of the main building. The bathrooms play an important role too as unlike in the west where there are fixed hygiene and sanitation standards, here in India things are different. For a remote but popular pilgrimage destination like Mantralayam in Andhra Pradesh hotel rooms with a western style toilet can be a difficult proposition. IHR is the only site which shows bathrooms as it arguably forms one of the important elements factors in a budget hotel where there are very few things to choose from.
We know that showing a not so clean image carries with itself a lot of inherent risks as it takes a lot of sheen away but then transparency(what you see what you get)has been a hallmark of IHR and would always remain so. It has been a mission for 2 and we have invested a lot in getting the neutral images, still we have miles to go before whole of India is covered. Ankit said in the concluding note.
