We are not there yet.
Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a change in travel tech that in turn has led more African entrepreneurs to build businesses from travel agencies, vacation rentals, and travel logistic companies. To put it into context, the travel market in Africa has one of the highest CAGRs and in turn as a marketplace, is growing larger and faster than a lot of other markets in the continent.
Sounds good, but only for the past decade, here’s why.
Companies such as Airbnb, Booking.com, and Vrbo in the USA pioneered the vacation rental space. While companies such as Uber, Bolt, and Lyft improved our day-to-day travel logistics. The companies aforementioned were visionary. They saw what we did not at the right time and improved the norm at pinpoint accuracy while leveraging on technology.
However, this new decade demands more. In a world where tech companies ship MVP-packed solutions on a daily, consumers don’t want just solutions. They want them better, easy and affordable. They want 1 solution to 100 problems at a click of a button. As I put it, “They don’t want you to innovate they want you to integrate”.
The internet, arguably man's greatest invention, acts as a plug to a connection of endless travel solutions.
Take an example of a basic traveler coming to Africa. You’d need to buy vacation outfits and gadgets, book a flight, book a place to stay, have a travel guide/tour company show you all the cool spots, and of course pay for all these things individually as part of your whole travel experience.
For all of these needs (I’d call them hustles), you’d probably need to use around 5 products at a minimum. From a consumer's perspective, it's not only a hustle it's also expensive as you need to pay service and transaction fees on each application.
Libraries and APIs have been used for years to reduce the development time and thus reduce the time to market for tech products. Yet the latter is true, they have been severely underutilized when allowing interoperability between applications. You’d argue this happens to reserve a company's competitive advantage, though for a consumer-driven market such as Africa it's about time we started thinking of this.
