StayVista’s Amit Damani on how childhood holidays inspired his venture
Luxury villa rental company StayVista’s co-founder Amit Damani talks about managing holiday homes and vacationers, the daily challenges they face, and the growing hunger for travel among Indians
Amit Damani remembers his grandmother’s 80th birthday because his extended family gathered for the celebrations in a rented villa in Lonavala, near Pune. Everyone was up past midnight as the octogenarian regaled them with stories.
“Those (kind of gatherings) don’t happen at home because if you’re at home, everyone has to leave by a certain time," says the co-founder of luxury villa rental company StayVista (formerly known as Vista Rooms). “But (on holiday) there’s no restriction on what time you have to be up till, what time you want to go to sleep, etc."
Damani, 37, narrates this story as an illustration of what family holidays mean in India, the joys of group travel and why their company is riding high on a growing travel trend—villa rentals. The Indian branded rental villa market, in 2023, was sized at $329.6 million and expected to reach $1,377 million by 2028, according to a report from Axon Developer.
StayVista has an inventory of about 1,200 properties across over 150 destinations in the country, expecting to hit a revenue of ₹240 crore in FY26, and a profit of close to ₹10 crore. Their properties are broadly across three categories: the luxury segment ( ₹12,000 plus on an average per night per room), the premium segment (between ₹7,000-10,000) and the budget segment ( ₹4,000-6,000), with Maharashtra being the largest market in terms of the number of properties. It still doesn’t have a lot of presence in the North-East, in places of pilgrimage and wildlife because supply in many of these places is limited, Damani says. They want to add those, keep expanding in existing markets, and offer guests other forms of travel, like glamping and cottages.
“We can see the hunger Indians have to travel. It’s no longer about doing a summer holiday or a Diwali holiday. It’s, like, I want to take a quarterly check (on holidays)," he says.
Damani grew up in a “big joint Marwari family" in Mumbai, which included uncles, cousins and grandparents, till the age of about 15. It was a fluid set-up, with up to six children squashed in a room, which may have, he admits, planted the idea of StayVista in his subconscious. Everything was common, shared and he doesn’t think he had ever been on a holiday with just his parents—it was always in a group.
His grandfather, Makhanlal, was in the bullion market, operating out of Zaveri Bazar, but his sons later worked in the stock market, transferring the family’s wealth creation in gold towards stocks and equity. But none of the newer generation got involved in the same business—Damani’s brother Aditya runs a consumer lending firm, Credit Fair.
Damani studied in Bombay International and Cathedral and John Connon schools, one that allowed him to learn and explore, another that was competitive. He earned his undergraduate degree in economics and international relations at Northwestern University in Chicago, initially aiming to become a diplomat.
A few internships followed, one of them at Goldman Sachs in Chicago, at the peak of the global financial crisis. “The markets tanked in my first week of work (in 2008). The next day, half of the office was fired. The person I was reporting to as an intern was gone. I was literally a fly on the wall, seeing what’s going on in such a large financial institution," he recalls.
The experience made him realise that financial services was not his calling (nor was diplomacy), so he thought about consulting to get exposure on building businesses and problem solving. He joined the non-profit Teach for India in 2010, teaching class III and IV children in a municipal school in Dharavi for two years. “I tell everyone that managing those 35 students is as hard as managing an organisation of 350 team members because you have to motivate each of those students," he says.
Damani joined a consulting firm Dalberg Global Development Advisors, focused on socio-economic development. But the idea of StayVista started “simmering at the back of the mind" two years later by 2014, when he left Dalberg.
A neighbour, Siddharth Ladsariya, founder of fleet management company Everest Fleet, introduced him to Ankita Sheth and Pranav Maheshwari, who would become Damani’s co-founders at StayVista. “We didn’t know each other; so I told everyone it was an arranged marriage," says Damani with a wide grin.
“We had to build our own trust in this sort of courtship phase of getting to know each other. But in three months, we took a call to build something together."
Sheth had a background in hospitality with OYO Rooms, while Maheshwari and Damani primarily lived out of suitcases working in consulting. The trio initially started working in the budget hotel segment in smaller cities, but the business model proved difficult to crack.
“It was a game of minimum guarantees because if you can’t take control of a property, then the experience is going to get hampered," says Damani.
Between 2016-18, the company that started with an angel round of about ₹3 crore, pivoted, creating a technology software for hotels to use for collecting reviews, managing a few apartments in Mumbai and even a cloud kitchen at one point. But the segment, also from memories of Damani’s and his co-founders’ childhood, closest to them was the holiday home segment. All three had grown up in joint families.
Since Indians love travelling in groups, homes are more conducive compared to hotel rooms for space and privacy. But large groups or families also would “literally pack half your house from here and go there," carrying everything from spices and cutlery to linen because they wouldn’t know what to expect at the other end.
Airbnb has started scaling up in 2017-18 and there was a lot more awareness for the segment, and unlike abroad, India didn’t have many professional companies that could manage people’s second homes. “There were gaps that needed to be solved operationally but we also saw that as an opportunity," says the father of a two-year-old.
The Damani family itself had a home in Lonavala for about three decades, which was being used only a few times a year for holidays. “So that’s about four-five days in a year and every time you go there, you only end up trying to fix the home because your taps are not running, the lights don’t work…"
This family home became part of the StayVista inventory as the founders tried to find balance between managing someone else’s home and ensuring a standard for vacationers. This, Damani says, in 2018-19 was the start of the real journey.
When they started out, Damani says, StayVista used certain metrics to identify properties like quality of pictures, response rate of home owner, etc. If these were poor, they figured that the home owner could use their help.
In 2018, they added the largest holiday destination in India, Goa, scaling up in north India and south India the following year. Before the pandemic, they had about 400 properties and had just closed a ₹10-crore funding round from DSG Consumer Partners, which helped through the first six months of the covid-19 pandemic. While the first months of the pandemic were difficult—following cancellations and zero bookings—they were fortunate that the funding came through. While hunkered down, the founders stayed busy strategising.
“He is a thinker, he has vision," Sheth says about Damani. “He is good at decisions, can clearly articulate his reasons for doing something. Though he puts all our names on it, the email that goes out from the company every year is written by him."
As the virus abated, the floodgates to travel opened. Travellers now preferred private places over hotels, which had common areas. More people were driving rather than taking flights. Digital nomads could work or study anywhere; so travel was not restricted to weekends. This meant the villa infrastructure had to be upgrade to include, for example, Wi-Fi.
“Prior to covid, if we did X amount of business, post was 50% higher and today, it’s about 30% higher," Damani says.
A Series B of ₹40 crore came in 2022, when the company was rebranded as StayVista, followed by another ₹40 crore this year from JSW Ventures, with the funds being used primarily for growth, acquisition, team building, technology, etc. The Indian vacation market, JSW Ventures said in a press release while announcing their investment, is valued at $22.3 billion, expected to reach $34.1 by 2029. Within this, the holiday segment is expanding the fastest, at a 13.5% CAGR.
Damani, naturally, has unique insights into the world of the Indian traveller. He says there are many more short-duration trips among big groups, celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, school reunions and bachelor parties. Groups choose places that are a short drive or a direct flight away from a big city, a destination inevitably with a villa with enough rooms.
Their team of about 400-odd people is primarily focused on acquiring properties and many of their employees perform multiple roles, including business development, sales, and even check-ins—if needed.
“Amit has a sense of breaking down problems into smaller, logical parts," says Maheshwari. “I have never seen him lose his temper. He is patient, but can be assertive too."
A decade into the business, and Damani still finds joy in exploring different parts of the country, seeing homes built improbably on a hill or with unique designs. Their business comes with daily challenges, of ensuring that SOPs are being followed across every property, every day.
For a home owner, because of their biases towards the home, feedback is difficult to deal with. He remembers one of their properties having a multi-purpose kettle that could be used for heating water and even making Maggi. But the guest insisted on a stove to heat milk.
“This is a small thing," he says, “but it doesn’t matter what you want to offer. If a guest wants something, you’ve got to figure it out."
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