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10 Tourism Tech Startups Helping Visitors To Explore Africa

10 Tourism Tech Startups Helping Visitors To Explore Africa

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Tourism tech startups are innovating and coming up with unique ways to help visitors explore the African continent.

From mobile apps that put travel guides at the fingertips of visitors to platforms that allow tourists to design their own vacation or experience, startups have tapped into the wants and needs of people taking a trip to countries across Africa.

With 58 million international tourists visiting Africa in 2016, earning the continent $35 billion in revenue, these startups are leveraging local knowledge and technology to provide visitors with anything from booking sites to duty free shopping without stepping foot off the plane.

Here are 10 tourism tech startups helping visitors to explore Africa.

Awesome South Africa

An app called Awesome South Africa that was launched slightly over  a year ago, allows travelers to locate places and activities for cities around South Africa. The main feature of the app is using location based data so users can find restaurants, hotels and leisure activities in their immediate vicinity. Users can expand their search in a 500km radius to find the exact venue or deal they’re looking for.

Cloud9XP

Kenyan e-travel startup Cloud9xp is an online marketplace for booking leisure experience across Africa. Users can book various experiences such as adventure or extreme outdoor activities that have been carefully selected by local experts directly from the platform. The startup is currently developing a mobile app to compliment its online platform, according to ITNewsAfrica.

Timbuktu

South African startup Timbuktu is an interactive tourism platform that gives travelers the ability to design and customize their own trip to Africa from a selection of hundreds of handpicked lodges and curated itineraries. A team of experts on the ground in Africa then books all arrangements to save time and money for the traveler. The startup was selected by the World Bank Group as one of 20 promising businesses for their acceleration initiative, XL Africa.

FOMO Group

Playing on the acronym for the words ‘fear of missing out’, the FOMO Group is divided into two subsidiaries – FOMO Travel and FOMO Payments – which give people the ability to travel without getting into debt. FOMO Payments allows travellers to utilize a gamified, lay-by, interest-free payment solution to fund their next adventure.

Cloomify

Cloomify is a Cameroonian search engine startup that is focused on helping people to find out more about their surroundings. The city guide mobile application works even when the user does not have an internet connection, allowing a tourist to use some functionality offline.

Tourism tech startups
African tourism tech startups are leveraging local knowledge and technology to cater for visitors. Photo – Flickr

Hotels.ng

Hotels.ng, the largest online hotel booking site in Nigeria, featuring hotels (some with discounted rates) in over 1,780 cities in the West African nation. Hotels.ng secured $1.2 million in funding from investors in 2015, and continues to grow its footprint in the country’s hotel market with over 10,000 of the establishments now listed on the site, according to Techcrunch. In January 2018, the startup launched Hotel.africa and Fly.africa as part of its expansion into Africa.

SleepOut

Kenyan hotel booking startup SleepOut provides a marketplace connecting travellers with individual hosts offering accommodation options. SleepOut caters to a wide range of budgets with places available in most remote tourist destinations across Africa. The company has offices in Mauritius and Kenya.

Eat Out

Kenya is not only thinking about where visitors will need to sleep, but also where they may like to eat. Kenyan startup Eat Out makes it possible to search for restaurants in Kenya and Tanzania by cuisine type, area or name via their app, while users can even book tables at restaurants, according to Memeburn.

Airshop

Cote D’Ivoire startup Airshop aims to cater to those who believe that a vacation or visit to a foreign country is not complete without some local shopping. The startup provides a platform that allows users to purchase goods and pick them up conveniently at a duty free shop during the course of their travels. The duty free shopping platform won the Ivorian leg of the global Seedstars World competition in 2015, according to Techcabal.

myRunner

The winner of the Seedstars Harare competition in Zimbabwe, myRunner is an online bus ticket booking platform and app that gives users useful functionality. The startup offers bus reviews, bookings and even live tracking of where each bus is in the system, making it easy for tourists to use the public transport system in Zimbabwe. Other similar startups include mTick, an online booking platform that provides users with the ability to book inter-city bus tickets in Cote D’Ivoire, and MyExpressTicket, an intra-urban real-time bus booking platform in Cameroon.