New Delhi-based Oravel.com was born with the idea of providing easy discovery and booking capabilities of clean, comfortable and affordable rooms in the country. Though the company is going ahead towards the larger launch on the 15 April 2012, the services have been active for the last six months with more than 150 listed destinations. The site has raised a seed round from private investors in March 2012 and is currently discussing Angel Rounds.

“Yes, at Oravel we were initially inspired by AirBNB, but here in India the problems and solutions were different. For Ex. We have executives who verify every space that is rented via Oravel and at the same time we lay high focus on servicing our hosts via non online models like Telephone Support Services which they're comfortable with,” Ritesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO, Oravel.com told India Digital Review.

“Eventually, we are trying to disrupt the hospitality market where the hotel prices have been going through the roof; and at the same time a lot of house owners have mammoths of space to spare if they can earn out of it, Oravel wants to be the enabler. We plan to seed the concept of comfortable yet affordable spaces by means of wowing our hosts and travellers every time they use Oravel,” said Ritesh Agarwal.

The site earns its revenues from a fixed Service Fee of 20 per cent on every booking, which they charge from hosts (House Owners) of. “We have been providing the services only in New Delhi NCR comprising Delhi, Gurgaon and Noida since we wanted to wow our hosts and travellers with our operational teams. Now that we have built the processes we are aggressively moving towards multi city launches,” said Agarwal. Oravel is based out of New Delhi and has a total team size of 10.