Nigerian startup Afriktrip has launched an online marketplace to help travellers and locals discover and book unique tours and activities in African countries, offered by independent companies and local tour guides.
Founded in February 2020 and launched publicly in November, Afriktrip provides travellers with a seamless and instant booking process, helping them save money with its best price guaranteed and cancellation policy.
It also aims to provide an element of trust via its tour partner vetting process, review system, and in-app messaging platform that allows travellers to communicate with these local tour guides without sharing their details.
“These days a lot of people are coming to Africa on holiday, especially Africans in the diaspora who are trying to connect back to their African roots,” said Ibukunoluwa Salau, Afriktrip’s founder and chief executive officer (CEO).
“Though they are coming, connecting with local tour guides and operators to take them around is a problem. Those that have managed to solve this problem, are faced with another problem of booking these tours and activities, because almost everything is offline and manual – 75 per cent of tour bookings are done offline.”
Afriktrip is helping to fix this problem, with the bootstrapped startup having signed up more than 300 tour partners, with more than 1,000 tours, and activities in 27 African countries so far.
“Uptake on both sides of the market has been encouraging, most especially on the side of the tour operators,” Salau said.
