"The challenge is that if you give hotels technology, they don't know how to use it. And if you just do consulting, then there are only so many hotels you can manage - scaling up becomes a problem," said Zuzu's co-founder Vikram Malhi.
"They feel like once I am listed on Expedia, I am done. But that is not it, that is just the beginning. You need to invest a lot of energy and resources managing it," he said.
He likened it to search engine optimisation (SEO), where companies have to meet a set of requirements for their websites to rank high on Google's results.
Similarly, Mr Malhi explained that online travel agencies judge hotels based on a certain criteria, such as a hotel's responsiveness to reviews, price-competitiveness and the type of promotions offered.
"When I came to Asia with Expedia, we were like a startup. Even though Expedia is a big company in the US, we were launching new markets," he said. "Once it got to a big scale, I was losing the excitement of building something from scratch."
But Mr Malhi believes what makes Zuzu's solution work is the complementary role of consultants. The startup assigns a revenue manager - an expert in e-commerce and online travel agencies - to each hotel.
"Because we have our own technology, it helps us automate a lot of the day-to-day work that revenue managers do. Therefore, each manager (from Zuzu) can manage a lot of properties, " he said.
Each revenue manager currently handles about 10 to 20 hotels, and they make up around one-quarter of the startup's 95 staff.
"Some of the hotel owners I talk to are basically saying things like 'You are a godsend', because they were actually struggling. We are not taking away any value from someone and keeping it for ourselves, we are instead creating value for everyone."