What hotelier Sunil J Trivedi didn’t realise about signing up with an aggregator was this: It could seriously lower the tone of an otherwise virtuous establishment. And all because of discounts.“Undercutting is totally not tolerable in this industry as it is harmful for our business and goodwill. This clearly impacted the customers coming to us as sometimes we got day use kind of bookings, which we never take,” said Trivedi, general manager of Riverview Hotel, a three star hotel in Ahmedabad.The property ended its relationship with Zo Rooms, backed by New York based Tiger Global, after what Trivedi said was an unhappy experience. Riverview is not alone.More than 200 hotels are estimated to have ended ties with leading aggregators Oyo Rooms and Zo in the last five-six months.But questions of morality are just one aspect of what troubles some hotels.Apart from undercutting hotels’ own sites, the aggregators are also being accused of not paying dues and making unrealistic promises to customers that the hotels are incapable of meeting, leading to trouble at check-in time.A spokesperson for Oyo, in which Softbank is an investor, said the company didn’t want to comment.There was no response to an email sent to Zo cofounder Paavan Nanda Oyo is in the process of acquiring Zo but the deal is said to have got stuck over terms To be sure, those 200 properties cited above are a small proportion of those that have tied up with aggregators.At its peak in 2015, Zo had 11,000 rooms at 1,000 hotels in more than 50 cities in India on its platform. Oyo says it has 45,000 hotel rooms in more than 170 cities.Meanwhile, some of those who’ve snapped ties have moved to rivals such as WudStay, Vista Rooms and Treebo Hotels, so it’s not as if they’ve stopped believing in the benefits of being associated with an aggregator.A Mumbai-based three-star hotel, which partnered with Oyo Rooms in mid-2015, said it had insisted that hour-use or day-use bookings shouldn’t be entertained.But that wasn’t made clear on the site, said the hotelier who didn’t want to be named. This put him in an uncomfortable situation.“We used to get couples wanting to use the hotel for a few hours. When we had the first such booking, we made it clear that we won’t accept such bookings as we had issues at the hotel,” he said. “The customer didn’t understand that we have a contract with the aggregator and they have to put these terms on their website as they represent us.”Aggregators of budget accommodation work by rebranding individual properties and promising standardised service levels.They seek to lure customers by selling inventory at a discount, as in e-commerce, taking the hit on themselves and passing on the full payment to the hotel — that’s the business model. But there seem to have been a few hitches.Mumbai-based hotelier Karl Kerawalla complained on Twitter in November that he hadn’t been paid by an aggregator.“Payment issues to Mumbai hotels. Not living up to written contracts. Going back & forth on all commitments,” he tweeted.He’d tied up for his three-star Karl Residency in Mumbai’s suburb of Andheri in early 2015. While all was well in the initial months of the tieup, things turned sour when bookings didn’t come in as contracted.“Their business is just to grab, grab and grab. They were unable to pay me the money for the pre-purchased rooms, which they had committed to purchase for the next month,” he said.That meant denying other customers even though the pledged rooms went unsold. Under the system, loyalty is given short shrift. Old customers weren’t pleased when they discovered much lower prices on an aggregator, souring long-standing relationships.But some industry sources say aggregators are getting the message as the overall fundraising environment slows and competition rises. They are correcting their course by focusing on quality and not just quantity.Manav Thadani, chairman, HVS Asia Pacific, said, “While there has been a lot of hype about the aggregator model, how many will survive depends on the management and having solid processes in place rather than deep discounting to win the game.”