Amit Saberwal
Two former MakeMyTrip executives, Amit Saberwal and Kunwar Asheesh Saxena, have teamed up to launch Commeasure, a plug and play platform for independent hotel owners in APAC designed to help them generate more direct bookings.
Drawing from their own experience in hotel sales, Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) and travel technology, their idea is for Commeasure to level the playing field between small chains/ independent hotels, making the hotel’s own brand web and mobile sites as good as the ones operated by multi-national hotel chains and large OTAs.
The Commeasure Platform provides independent hotels with a bouquet of services and is designed to be affordable and scalable and is built on cloud with the latest technology stack.
Saberwal was Chief Business Officer of MMT while Saxena was Director Hotel Technology – the duo worked together for five years before deciding to embark on this entrepreneurial journey. Says Saberwal, Founder and CEO, “I was an hotelier for many years, prior to joining MakeMyTrip.com in its start up phase in 2005. As we built a highly successful online hotel business at MakeMyTrip, one thing that did not change was that many of my hotel friends and ex-colleagues continued to be blissfully ignorant of the changes that were taking place in the online hotel space.
“With time, customer acquisition got more and more complicated. As customers started using mobile and social media to check on prices and reviews, independent hotels kept falling further behind.
“Solutions available to them, were either too expensive or addressed only one part of the customer acquisition problem. A quick look at the scenario revealed a huge opportunity to bring small, independent and boutique hotels at par with bigger international chains on the customer acquisition front.
“That’s when Asheesh and I decided to build a comprehensive plug & play solution for hotels that would enable them to acquire customers from their own mobile and websites and thus lower their cost of distribution. We decided to focus on the customer acquisition and retention side of the business while opening our platform for integration with good technology partners that are complementary to our offering.
“Our focus is to keep things simple for hoteliers so that they can spend more time and effort on keeping their guests happy, while Commeasure works on keeping their web presence at par with competitors.”
Says Saxena, who is Cofounder and CTO, “Post MakeMyTrip I joined Knimbus, a knowledge sharing online portal to head their Technology and Product Development Team but soon realised that my true calling was in travel. I think we are solving a real pain point now and given our experience in the online hotel space, we have the necessary expertise and exposure to solve this problem.”
While Commeasure is B2B (business to business) with the target market being hotels, it is focused on the end customer experience. Commeasure plans to equip their hotel clients with tools that will help end-consumers (C) search for and access the hotel’s web/mobile site with ease, like the user experience, locate all pertinent information and be inspired to book directly with confidence.
Saberwal said Commeasure addresses a fundamental pain point in the industry, specifically for smaller/independent hotels. “They have been struggling to retain control for their direct bookings because of very average websites, no focus on mobile customers, legacy booking engines and lack of resources.
“These days guests use a variety of devices to access the internet and lack of a fully optimised and responsive mobile and website along with low social media coverage leads to poor visibility and user experience. Guests check reviews and the hotel’s reputation in cyberspace which influences their decision. Lack of resources and time make it difficult for independent hotels to keep up with the big boys.
“Commeasure is able to offer expertise in design, product management, marketing and technology that is usually very expensive by pooling resources across multiple hotels and allowing each hotel to benefit as if it were part of a large group of hotels.” In the initial rollout, Commeasure would manage the customer acquisition cycle – generating traffic, providing the tools for booking and engaging with the hotels customers.
