IHR aka India Hotel Review an Online Travel portal based at Noida is just nominated by Tata Nen as among the most promising StartUps, making it eligible for The TATA NEN Startups Awards. TATA NEN Startups Awards is the first ever people’s choice Awards for recognizing the highest-potential startups in India.

So is the news a surprise.” not really “says Ankit Rastogi, the energetic 27 year old founder of India Hotel Review. “We have made vast progress within a time span of just two years. The road was not easy as it meant to compete with established players in the market. Ours is now the largest online search, booking and rating community for hotels across India covering more than 900 unique destinations”. Targeting Budget Travelers and Unknown destinations is the USP of IHR.

IHR is primarily into online booking of Hotels. It has the most exhaustive list of hotels including those from the hitherto neglected Grade B Destinations. “After starting small we have now the largest collection of Budget Travellers, this is something unique” says Swapnil Srivastava the Co founder and CEO of Vriti Infocom.

Hotel bookings at IHR are faster and cheaper. A well experienced call centre team of 25 manages the bookings. In a majority of cases individual travellers pays the whole amount in advance, while for group there is an option of part payments also.

With Hotel Bookings IHR has also forayed into packages and advance booking of cabs and buses along with selling travel vouchers to corporate houses. Apart from the revenue generating part IHR provides a travel community. A platform where people can post their travel - related queries for free. IHR is committed to provide answer to all the queries by dedicated and well informed team city experts from that particular city.

IHR has a very optimistic as well as prudent plan ready for the days ahead. The target by January 2009 is to generate 10,000 daily views and 1000 leads per day. This is some thing very achievable says an optimistic Ankit. “We are in the constant process of understanding and giving the highest value to a traveller as well as widening the service base. If we continue to do so we can reach much beyond the targets”.