“There is only one boss; The customer.”
That’s the slogan written on a poster in an open plan office housing Africa’s fast growing online hotel booking startup Jovago.com in Nairobi, which this month celebrated their two-year anniversary since launching in Africa.
The startup was founded by Africa Internet Group, that owns several other internet startups including Lamudi, Hello Foods and Jumia, and has regional telecoms firms MTN and Millicom as its key investors.
Estelle Verdier-Watine, Jovago’s Eastern and Southern Africa managing director and one of the company’s founding members, told AFKInsider in an interview that the company aims “to make travel in Africa easy and affordable.”
“Over the last two years we’ve partnered with over 25,000 hotels making us the largest hotel booking website in Africa,” she said, adding that they negotiate deals for their users at least once a month with each of these hotels.
Jovago, which has over 200,000 hotel listings across the world, started off in Nigeria and Kenya and has expanded into 10 African countries including Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Ghana.
The company has grown its East African staff ten folds since it started operations in the region, from just seven employees in 2013 to over 75 currently. It has over 400 staff across Africa.
Africa’s hotel industry is waking up to online bookings as more and more people connect to the internet using their smartphones. This has seen several internet based booking companies, such as Hotels.ng in West Africa and SleepOut, spring up to capture this opportunity.
There is however still challenges getting customers to trust online businesses and getting payments from them since most transactions in many African countries, apart from East Africa where there is a well developed mobile money transfer system, are still cash-based.
“The main challenge is complete lack of trust for online businesses. Basically, there is this perception that online businesses are not real businesses. But this is changing a lot with the entry of professional stakeholders like Jumia,” Verdier-Watine said.
“When I started, I would go to meet hotel managers but immediately I would mention online they would think this is a scum,” she added.
To counter this Jovago has had to adapt to the African traveler’s needs including allowing hotel bookings online without a credit card and paying on arrival, something that is not possible in developed countries where almost everyone has a credit card.
Low internet use in many places in Africa has also been a challenge for Jovago, which estimates that only about 1 percent of hotels booking on the continent are made online, compared to Western countries where at least 50 percent of booking and payments are done online.
“Many of our customers are making their first online booking,” Verdier-Watine said.
But even with this low penetration, Verdier-Watine said the industry is quickly waking up to online transactions and they are getting more request from hotels to sign-up on to Jovago’s service.
