These rooms offer young Indian lovers rare privacy. Pass on the complaints.

Privacy can be hard to come by in India. Life is a communal whirl of relatives, neighbors and friends. Cities are busy and curious eyes are everywhere.

Meet Oyo, a popular hotel booking platform. The company, backed by big names in venture capital, built a hip reputation as a gateway to “love hotels” for unmarried couples. The budget rooms allowed young lovers, who might otherwise steal furtive kisses in the nooks and crannies of public parks or shopping malls, to indulge their passions behind closed doors.

Now Oyo is shedding its image as a haven for connections. This month it revised its policies to give some partner hotels the freedom to deny rooms to young couples unless they provide proof of marriage.

So far, the change only applies to Meerut, a medium-sized city northeast of New Delhi. The company said the new policy was in response to complaints from community groups and was formulated “in line with local social sensitivities.”

Oyo’s move sparked memes and a backlash on social media, especially among people in their 20s. For many, it highlighted the tension between traditional values ​​and modern ideals that shapes the lives of millions of young Indians.

Premarital sex is still largely taboo in this deeply conservative country, where marriages are traditionally arranged by families. It is widely seen as an evil import from the less inhibited West, and as an insult to Indian culture that must either be controlled or not recognised.

The stigma around premarital sex is about “family honor,” says Chirodip Majumdar, an associate professor at Rabindra Mahavidyalaya, a university in the eastern state of West Bengal. Yet more and more young people are doing it, research shows.

Views on premarital sex vary according to class differences, Mr Majumdar said, with people with higher incomes viewing it more favorably. “They have more social interactions, more knowledge about contraceptive mechanisms and more exposure to Western culture,” he said.

Many young Indians have also embraced liberal attitudes to dating and sex that transcend caste, class and religion, and still often dictate arranged marriages.

Dating apps like Tinder are popular, as are hookups. A 2022 study published in the journal Sexuality & Culture found that 55 percent of young adults in four cities in India “engaged in sex, indicating that the norm regarding sexual behavior may be shifting.”

Neha, a 34-year-old consultant from Bengaluru, said she and her husband rented Oyo rooms twice a week when they were dating. Neha, who asked that her last name not be used, recalled the judgmental looks that hotel owners, including those who did not use the Oyo platform, often directed her way.

At some hotels, owners questioned their marital status before turning them away.

But Oyo became such an important part of their romance that when the couple got married in 2017, their animated video wedding invitation included a reference to the hotel platform.

“Everyone knew we were using Oyo,” Neha said, adding, “So we put that in our wedding invitation.”

India’s lack of private spaces for intimacy created a market for companies like Oyo.

It is not unusual to see young lovers secretly exchanging kisses in near-empty cinemas or under the arches of abandoned monuments in the sweltering heat of a Delhi summer. Bathroom stalls and fitting rooms are all fair game. Cyber ​​cafes can be a make-out zone.

In the critically acclaimed 2024 film ‘All We Imagine as Light’ which explores the intersecting lives of three women in Mumbai, one of the characters finds a deserted patch of forest to have sex with her boyfriend.

Manforce, which bills itself as India’s best-selling condom brand, last year ran a series of humorous ads showing couples doing it in private corners of public spaces – a car, a park, a cinema.

Oyo was founded in 2013 and is backed by investment firms including SoftBank. It expanded to the United States in 2019, and last year too bought the Motel 6 chain.

In India, it offers rooms for as little as 500 rupees, or less than $6, per night, no questions asked. The platform became popular with small hotel owners, who by signing up with Oyo are required to adhere to its standards and use the brand name.

On Google, one of the first search questions for Oyo is: “Can I stay in Oyo with my girlfriend?” Although Oyo also serves individual business travelers and other customers, the company leaned on its image by offering room searches under filters such as “relationship mode.”

Now, though, it’s haunting more families.

In an ad released last yeara young couple sits at the dining table with the woman’s family. Their marital status is unclear. After she tells her father that they have booked a weekend away with Oyo, he looks at them in shock.

When the couple says it is more fun with family, the father expresses confusion: “What are you talking about?” The next frame shows the whole family checking into a sparkling Oyo hotel. The father then says, “This is what you’re talking about!”

Pragati KB reporting contributed.