Startup Globa.li tries to take bookings for African hotels and tours into the 21st century

Go to TripAdvisor, enter Masai Mara, Kenya, and sure enough you will get some great, inspiring recommendations. The problem, however, is that most of these properties are not yet bookable online. So prospective customers reading a TripAdvisor review usually have the option to either email the hotel or be redirected to a third party website, usually featuring a range of competitors.

Enter Sarah Fazendin…her new company, Globa.li, a curated market place or online travel agent, is aiming to address this problem. “The way that properties in Africa, and tours as well, have been distributed to the US market is pretty complex and archaic,” she says.

Globa.li claims to offer more specialty lodging inventory than others in the marketplace. “We’re aggregating our own inventory which is a mix of pulling from existing services as well as offering hotels the ability to upload content onto our own system if they don’t have one already in place.”