Branded budget hotel room operator OYO Rooms and Airtel have signed an agreement to provide internet connectivity and and direct-to-home services to more than 3,000 OYO rooms. The partnership will start in the cities of Gurgaon, Bengaluru and Chennai, and will subsequently be implemented across all OYO Rooms in India in weeks to come. It's worth remembering that Airtel also has a deal with online cab-hailing service Uber where Uber cabs will be equipped with free Airtel 4G WiFi for usage. As part of the Uber deal, users also got an option to pay for their cab rides with Airtel Money. We wonder why the deal did not entail an option to pay via Airtel Money, it would have certainly pushed more uses cases. OYO Rooms has previously tied up with Ola Money as a payment method. Funding: In August, OYO Rooms raised $100 million in a funding round led by SoftBank group and participation from existing investors Greenoaks Capital, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed India. OYO would use the latest round of funding to implement new customer experience initiatives, build technology products, and extend its network. Other developments - Earlier this month, OYO Rooms piloted Oyo Cafe, an aggregator platform which will list its hotels’ food items to be sold under the Oyo Cafe brand. Oyo Cafe will make us of excess hotel inventory, and also possible use Zomato or Swiggy to deliver the food, padding the revenue generation for its partners. - In October, online travel agencies (OTAs) like MakeMyTrip and Yatra decided to delist OYO…
