Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Dr. Nitin Mittal: Twenty plus years of travel trade with some of the biggest names and another decade with the start-ups, I wanted to provide a platform which can be equally sensitive to large corporate clients to SMEs customer base, supporting their most frequented business destinations but bringing expertise in emerging geographies like, Egypt, Cambodia, Philippines, Saudi Arabia to Africa as latter not focussed by other major players, due to their volatile currencies, lack of branded properties and unreliable partners. However there were substantial queries for these locations since such countries are seeing major technological upgrades and no one to cater to them. We decided to concentrate on solving this problem and support them.
Great Companies: What are the various Services provided by Hotel N Apartment
Dr. Nitin Mittal: We provide personalised solutions for your employees business accommodation requirements, giving them best value of money, with maximum comfort - where each requirement is reviewed, options are well researched and finally giving them right solutions to choose ! In business especially, time is money and we brought a consultative approach against cut and paste solutions, as there are plenty in the era of Online Travel Agencies. From Hotels to Serviced Apartments to Serviced residences, for all your short term accommodation to project related stays, Hotel N Apartment caters to all your temporary business accommodation requirements.
Great Companies: What makes Hotel N Apartment different from hundreds of other similar service providers?
Dr. Nitin Mittal:
We are in competition with NO ONE and have no desire to play the game of being better with anyone. We are simply trying to be better than the company we were yesterday. Keeping a motto of, We don't have to be smarter than others, we have to be more consistent in providing our services than the rest !
With regards to competition, I strongly believed in Gandhi's quote, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then fight with you and finally respect you!" We are lucky to have reached phase 3 of the proverb, if not last !
Major differentiator is the personalized and analytical approach to each corporate client, where a dedicated customer service manager is assigned to respective accounts. In today's world where a pool of resources is working on multiple requirements, with no clue of specific ask for a client, this is a refreshing change where we put our customer and their preferences first and suggest options / solution basis their group's cumulative requirements and interest. We provide measurable savings even when compared to ruthless online rates, however the focus is to handhold the end user who is looking for a comforting stay environment especially when working in a foreign location, away from the family.
Great Companies: What are the struggles and challenges you face?
Dr. Nitin Mittal: Turning entrepreneur at the peak of your corporate career brings challenges in terms of anxiety and financial constraints. Also, being a bootstrapped company, I tried investing in this dream, by putting personal assets on mortgage and gradually funded by banks, although non collateral business loans came at a very high rate of interest however they were required since ours is a very capital intensive business model. We had to make a fine balance between growth, expansion and available resources.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for Hotel N Apartment?
Dr. Nitin Mittal: We want to bring artificial intelligence and other technological advancement, at our mid office level, so we can understand the trends of future requirement basis mining the available data. Also technology to be deployed to understand the demand and supply dynamics, which would help in identifying the available inventories and negotiating them better, to bring cost advantage to our clients. We would also like to have offices in all the continents, giving clients advantages of local invoicing, saving them the cost of currency conversion and cross border transfer charges.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Dr. Nitin Mittal: A mixture of a few pieces of advice.
Anything is possible if you believe in it and have a passion to bring it to a logical conclusion.
Always be committed and focussed.
It is fine to try and fail, but never fail to try.
You will never lose – Either U win or U learn !
Talent will get you in the door, but character will keep you in the room.
Nothing will work, unless you Do!
Website : https://hotelnapartment.com/