As ‘Pruvo’, begins offering its services for travel agents / OTA’s in Indian market amid COVID Crisis, Travel Newsy Interviews Mr. Doron Nadivi, Chief Commercial Officer.
Travel Newsy: Please tell us the story behind PRUVO, your services, and your business plans in India.
Doron Nadivi: Pruvo initially started as a B2C service, after our founder, Itai Marcipar booked hotels for his honeymoon, and a few weeks later (prior to departure), he noticed that the prices of many of his hotel reservations were 35% less than what he initially booked for, so he rebooked the cheaper rates and cancelled the original ones. More importantly, he understood right there and then that this is a problem that needs a savvy solution. So after a few years of development alongside Pruvo´s other Co-founder, Regev Brody, Pruvo launched in 2016 its free service for travelers worldwide who want to save money on hotels they ALREADY booked.
Fast forward to 2019. Many travel companies (OTAs, hotel wholesalers, travel agencies, tour operators) reached out to us and asked if our service can help them increase their hotel booking profitability. So, we launched a new service, Pruvo Revenue Maker, an AI-Driven solution especially for travel companies that automatically tracks hotel bookings made on any provider, monitors their price 24/7 and helps travel companies increase their hotel booking profitability by 36% (average) by rebooking those reservations when their net price drops.
Regarding our plans in India, we reached a strategic decision at Pruvo that India is one of the top 4 countries in which we are focusing our Business Development efforts. The reason is that India´s growth as an emerging market has been consistently growing for many years, and the travel industry is seeing a consistent increase not only in domestic but also international travel originated from India.
Travel Newsy: How has COVID-19 impacted PRUVO and what are your plans once restrictions are eased?
Doron Nadivi: Just like everyone else, COVID-19 has impacted our business as well. However, reviewing these past 3 months, our achievements have been remarkable in regard to the number of new partners we have onboarded for our Hotel Post-Booking Profit Optimisation Service, Pruvo Revenue Maker.
The nature of a disruptive startup is to always find where the opportunity lies in the midst of a crisis.
We embraced this period in which companies have no revenue-generating activities going on in order to explain to potential partners that this is the ideal time for implementing a zero risk, innovative solution that will help them increase their hotel booking profits once travel restarts.
We are partnering with more and more IT platforms on a weekly basis such as IT4T from India, TravelgateX, DCS Plus, and others so that their customers can use Pruvo Revenue Maker with zero integration needed. Integration is the deal-breaker for many companies, and in order to ensure a smooth and swift onboarding plan, we took upon ourselves almost all of the integration work, thus removing any obstacle a potential partner might have.
It’s interesting because only a few months ago, I read Grant Cardone’s book “10X Rule”. In the book, he explains his mentality during the 2008 crisis regarding his own business. Grant shares that “while everyone was downsizing and cutting costs, I was hiring sales executives and increasing my ad spend to take advantage of the fact that my competition has left the playing field”.
Since both myself and Pruvo´s CEO, Itai, read this book prior to COVID-19´s outbreak, we took this same approach towards this pandemic, and the results are definitely showing. We doubled our workforce during these months and the amount of new onboarded partners has increased exponentially. Unfortunately, many companies don´t have this mindset (haven´t read 10X Rule yet 😊 ) and instead of focusing this time to innovate, to improve & to prepare the foundations when borders re-open, they postpone everything to post Corona. Pruvo is going to reap incredible results post-COVID, but it´s all due to the actions and aggressive approach we took during COVID.
Travel Newsy: With little guest movement Post COVID restrictions, It is being anticipated that hotels may be reducing their rates to compete with each other to attract guests, do you think this will impact on your business model?
Doron Nadivi: Two main changes will occur with hotel rates: 1) Non-refundable rates will be very rarely purchased, 2) Hotel Rates will be extremely volatile since past occupation trends will be meaningless for the near future
Both of these factors favor our business model, since
- The more market volatility, the more value we can bring to our partner travel companies since there is a higher probability that the net price of their existing reservation will drop after they already sold the reservation.
- Our business model works with refundable rates, so the elimination of non-refundable rates will increase the number of potential reservations we can increase profitability for.
Travel Newsy: When do you foresee Business coming back to normal?
It depends on the region, which is why it´s important to grow a global business from the beginning. That said, my guess is as good as anyone´s. I am positively optimistic that we will see fewer restrictions and more movement towards the end of Q3.
Travel Newsy: In these unprecedented times, what is your USP to attract travel agents as they may themselves be looking maximise their profits by researching and rebooking whatever little bookings they get?
There are quite a few actually. First, Pruvo removed any and all risk involved for our partner travel companies, since we temporarily removed all setup fees (as long as the integration is made via 1 centralized API) and almost all the integration is done on our end. So in essence, we are offering travel companies a zero-risk, zero out-of-pocket solution to help them increase hotel booking profits (present and future) by 36%.
In addition, we customise our solution to their exact needs (multiple rebooking methods, the decision upon which providers to track, the decision on the maximum amount of rebookings per each reservation, and much more).
Our solution also helps travel companies overcome a tedious, expensive problem they tend to have when trying to manage this in-house – hotel room mapping across many providers!
Our AI-driven room mapping algorithm is capable of not only comparing the same room over the different providers but ALSO finds UPGRADED rooms (at a lower cost) for our partners and customers.
Lastly, Pruvo is the Only Company that nor only helps our partners increase profitability, but also generates new hotel sales opportunities via audiences that they are not currently exposed to
