Startup Stories Series: Building a Booking Startup in Southern Africa
Skift Take
How does a travel startup succeed in Zimbabwe and throughout Sub-Saharan Africa? Focus on a neglected space in a huge market. Whether startup Africabookings can make it as a business remains to be seen. The market opportunity, though, is certainly humongous.
In our Skift Startup Stories series, we document travel startup issues, solutions, and lessons from a variety of angles, hoping to shed light on what separates the winners from the losers.
You can read all of the stories in the series here.
Bruce Tapping, the CEO of Africabookings, believes he's in the right place at an opportune moment.
Born in Zimbabwe and after starting a tourism magazine in Cape Town, South Africa in 1993, Tapping began a self-imposed exile in London in 2000, working in publishing, and then relocated to China where he took up a position in finance.
"I met up with a couple of other tourism professionals in China and together we decided that the online space in Africa is what was interesting," Tapping says. "It was time to move into it. We see a lot of statistics which indicate that Africa is going to take off pretty rapidly. So we decided to come back here and really get in and start signing up hotels and distributing them online."
Tapping returned to Harare, Zimbabwe and got Africabookings off the ground in 2014. Using their own shareholder capital and having attracted a modest $25,000 in open-the-office door money from Travel Startups Incubator, the three-employee Africabookings has set its sights on bringing some hotels online for the first time in sub-Saharan Africa, including countries such as Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.
In addition to the three full-time staff members, five to 10 people work for Africabookings in sales on a contractor basis, pushing the company's B2B connectivity technology to property owners and manage
