“Now we have more and more requesting to join our service. We are doing less and less proactive acquisition of hotels. People are coming to us because we’ve created trust,” she said, adding that this has helped them grow their booking at between 20 – 40 percent every month.

“We are seeing very fast adoption of our service and lots of repetitive customers,” Verdier-Watine said.

Being the biggest hotels booking portal in Africa has also come with its advantages for Jovago.

With a large pool of local travelers booking through the website, little known hotels  in far flung corners of the continent are willing to negotiate much lower prices for customers booking through it.

This has enabled Jovago to offer cheaper rates to their customers and says it would refund anyone who after booking with them get another site offering a price lower than them.

” We want people to use our service because it’s the cheapest option for them. That’s our number one driver,” Verdier-Watine said.

“The big players like Bookings.com and Expedia focus on five-star hotels and the western population. We focus on the African population. We have similar services but not targeting the same population. We have some small players like SleepOut and SafariNow. Most of them started but got discouraged at some point and left.”

The startup, which says is now “everywhere” it wants to be in Africa, is looking to expand its service to other continents starting with Asia.

Next it will be looking at venturing into plane ticketing. But that Verdier-Watine said will have to wait until they’ve exhaustively covered the hotels booking markets, which she says still has a lot of potential.

“We’ve started operation in Asia. We’ve started with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar,” she said. “Plane ticketing is something we’ve been thinking a lot about. It’s very complex, so we don’t want to rush into it.”