Jovago: An African Online Hotel Booking Startup With Budget Travelers In Mind

“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.

Looking For Growth

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.

“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.”