The most important thing the branded aggregation came in is with technology, their booking engine is powerful, their brand website has a strong impact for converting lookers into bookers. Their distribution was seamless and approach to standardize the accommodation with features like clean rooms, free wifi, breakfast did catch up the attention of new age consumers.
Branded Rooms works on analytics spends time to understand the customer and deeply engaged to optimize the revenue. Though this tools were available independent hotels stayed away, technology is expensive but it is scalable business opportunity.
Independent and small hotels need to leverage technology, automation of all your reservations from any buyers are key to the future business opportunity, budgeting and forecasting does not have to be done by large hotels chains it can be done by independent hotels / any accommodation partners. Acid test for any hotel is to calculate what % percentage of their business is automated and keep a goal to achieve higher benchmarks for future.
There is a paradigm shift in the Indian hospitality industry and new branded rooms has brought in great amount of learning to the current industry business patterns.