Startup Stories Series: Building a Booking Startup in Southern Africa
Photo Credit: Africabookings CEO Bruce Tapping in Domboshawa, outside Harare, Zimbabwe. Africabookings
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 retur
