Russian online hotel booking site Oktogo.ru, which provides online hotel booking worldwide, boasts a directory of over 2500 Russian hotels and apartments and 140,000 hotels in 160 countries and 26,000 cities. The site claims to be working with hotels directly, and promises customers the best prices in the industry. Obviously, they must be doing something right.
The site has been recently included in The Top 10 Russian Internet Brands Out to Conquer the World by The Moscow Times. The site is already a leader among Russian online travel sites in the National Geographic Traveler Awards 2012.
A hotel booking site that launched on the marked in 2010, Oktogo.ru is still considered a startup. However, last year alone, the site generated over $1 billion in gross online bookings, according to the listing in The Moscow Times:
Global online travel agencies generated over $1 billion in gross online bookings in Russia last year. That was about half of the market. The other half is being grabbed by Russian upstart Oktogo.ru, headed up by Marina Kolesnik. The Russian online travel market looks set to rocket thanks to the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014 and the World Football Championship in 2018.
Oktogo.ru ranks on the same list with other top players in the Russian internet scenery, including design studio Art. Lebedev, mobile game Cut the Rope (Om Nom), fshionista and design community Look At Me, online dating site Mamba, Russian sports-car maker Marussia, social network Odnoklassniki, direct consumer and online banking system Tinkoff, mobile TV SPB TV, and online multiplayer game World of Tanks.