Oral History of Online Travel: How Travelstart Taught South Africa’s Airlines About E-Commerce
Skift Take
Building up an affiliate network became a great marketing tool for Travelstart in South Africa a decade ago because print ads weren't effective. The incumbent competitors weren't particularly effective because they had no focus on e-commerce.
Skift launched its largest and most ambitious project yet, The Definitive Oral History of Online Travel, on June 1.
In nearly 40,000 words founders, CEOs, other executives and insiders tell a story in their own words about the creation of Internet giants such as Expedia, Priceline, Travelocity, Orbitz, TripAdvisor and more.
Not all of the interviews fit into the big story so we are publishing standalone stories that offer deeper insight into information we collected during the three-month research process.
Stephan Ekbergh, who founded Travelstart in Sweden in 1999, got bored on vacation in South Africa in 2004. So he did what just about anyone would do when looking for fun on vacation -- he phoned local global distribution system contacts and invited them to lunch.
Ekbergh learned about the state of the travel market there and found out that offline players were consolidating and there were a handful of online players, such as LastMinute.com and Kalahari.com, but none wer
