We are pleased to announce that we are now the second-largest hotel group in China. We expanded our presence to 320 cities with 10,000 OYO-branded hotels and 450,000 rooms within 18 months of our foray into the country. We surpassed the scale of traditional and established hotel chain brands in the country, such as Home Inn, Hanting and others. 97% of our franchisee partners renewed their contracts with us, which has been highly encouraging and reflective of the impact that we have created for our asset owners, both at occupancy and revenue levels while providing quality affordable accommodations to our guests.
We have revolutionized the fragmented and legacy-driven budget hospitality space in China by building a brand, optimizing costs, hiring talent, as well as leveraging brand channels. We focused on second-tier cities and expanded our roots deep into the country’s tier-2 to tier-6 cities to offer standardized good quality hospitality experiences at affordable prices. Our asset owners, who have been part of our hotel group for 3 months or more, have, on average, seen a 2X increase in occupancy (see table below). Our mission is to create beautiful living spaces and deliver an elevated guest experience which has helped improve occupancy and stay experience at our hotels. For example, several OYO hotels have witnessed significantly improved ratings on portals like Fliggy within 3 months of onboarding. We have also created over 100,000 job opportunities for young people across the country and will continue to do so.
To ensure asset owners have improved visibility on potential customers from around the world, we are also exploring ways to collaborate with online travel agents (OTAs) such as Fliggy, Ctrip and others, along with other consumer traffic-building platforms. We recently announced a strategic partnership with Alipay and later launched the OYO mini program in Alipay. We aim to cooperate in areas like membership, traffic exchange, scenario integration, finance services, smart payment, credit life, and hotel upgrades. As of now, we get 25% of bookings from OTAs in China. Today, we are less than 2% of the country’s accommodation market that stands at ~35 mn rooms. We have an incredible opportunity ahead of us and we are just getting started.
