Police swept through the Mumbai hotels at about 3pm, going room to room, arresting more than 40 unmarried couples. All were charged. The college students were forced to call their parents and admit what they had done.

Their crime was “indecent behaviour in public”, the police said. For couples without marriage certificates in India – especially those of different faiths – spending time in a hotel room together can still be a struggle.

But where many Indians see immorality, others in the country’s digital startup industry have seen opportunity.



“We have a guaranteed promise,” says hotel entrepreneur Blajoj “Blaze” Arizanov. “No knocks on the door, no weird stares, no questions asked.”

For nearly three years Arizanov, a Macedonian, and his Indian co-founder, Sanchit Sethi, have been pursuing an unlikely goal: to bring a version of Japan’s short-stay “love hotels”, designed for urgent amorous encounters, to India.

StayUncle, their company, added its 800th hotel partner in February and clocked up $3m in total sales. The startup is helping to drive a more couple-friendly attitude across the Indian hotel industry – even if society is still catching up.

“Even today, around half of my team doesn’t tell their family they work for StayUncle,” Arizanov says.



StayUncle started in 2015 as a hotel aggregator, selling half-day stays aimed at business people seeking a nap or somewhere to freshen up. But sales were slow.



“It wasn’t a problem to die for,” Arizanov says. “As a startup, you want to solve a problem that is of severe importance.”

In the meantime, the website was being inundated with couples seeking privacy. “We got to know they were coming to us because they couldn’t book a hotel with local IDs,” he says. “It was a tragic thing – but maybe the opportunity we had been scouting for all this time.”

Winning over hotels was the hardest step. Eight out of 10 dismissed the idea outright. “They said no, it’s against law, it’s immoral, blah blah blah,” Arizanov says.

Asking them to shed their old-fashioned ideas rarely worked. What did, however, was an appeal to the hip pocket – and the rapid growth of Airbnb.



“We told them, you can choose to be conservative, or you can open your eyes to the opportunity,” Arizanov says.

“There are thousands of young people with well-earning jobs and lots of free money who want to have fun. And if you reject them Airbnb will take your piece of the pie.”



Most hotels were satisfied when the money started flowing, and many now approach StayUncle asking to be listed. But Arizanov says he still “mercilessly” cuts at least 10 each month for being insufficiently discreet.



Other hotels have asked to be taken off the website after seeing StayUncle’s provocative marketing.

When the company posted a picture on Facebook of two Hindu deities checking into a room, it got death threats. When Arizanov insisted on calling the website’s blog Naughty Sita, after another Hindu god, staff threatened to quit. (It was retitled Naughty Bharat, or Naughty India, last month.)



Dressed in a black turtleneck, with shoulder-length hair, Arizanov, 29, looks like a thoroughly modern prophet as he propounds his philosophy of business. “We have to be controversial to survive,” he says.

But his Indian colleagues are less breezy. “I was struggling with the idea,” says his co-founder, Sethi. “The struggle is continuing.”

The business is still an awkward subject in his family, who are from a small city near the holy city of Varanasi. “Some of them, who have more progressive minds are OK,” he says. “Others are still on their way to accepting it.”

StayUncle’s greatest threat may be competition. India’s largest network of budget accommodation, Oyo, recently introduced a “relationship mode”, listing hotels that have agreed not to hassle unmarried couples.



Arizanov is convinced the concept will boom in India. After all, he says, Japan, where they were pioneered, is a conservative country too.



“They’re going to be an escape route,” he says. “Rather than let that repressed sexual energy pile up and manifest in some other way, we are helping them dissolve in some alternative channel, quietly.”