Africa has real OTAs. What it does not have is the infrastructure to let them win. That distinction matters more than most industry observers acknowledge.
Wakanow operates in 11 countries, has serious institutional backing from The Carlyle Group, and achieved $55 million in ticket sales as early as 2013. Travelstart raised $40 million from Amadeus Capital Partners, reached 2 million monthly users across 16 countries at its peak, and has expanded through acquisitions including Club Travel in 2019. These are not experiments. They are mature businesses executing against a genuine continental opportunity. And yet neither has broken out the way Despegar broke out in Latin America not because of strategic failure, but because the environment they are operating in has not caught up with their ambition.
That gap between ambition and infrastructure is the actual story.
The payment wall is not a friction problem. It is a structural one.
Only 30% of travel bookings in Africa are conducted online, against a global average of 50%. The 20-point deficit is not explained by consumer preference. It is explained by what happens when an African traveler tries to pay. Card penetration is thin across francophone West Africa and much of Central and East Africa. Where cards exist, they routinely fail at authorization flagged by international acquirers as high-risk, blocked by domestic banks treating travel purchases as suspicious. The resulting chargeback rates push acquirers to raise thresholds, OTAs absorb higher processing costs, margins compress, and expansion slows. The payment infrastructure does not just make growth harder. It actively penalizes ambition.
Wakanow responded by building an entirely separate company to solve it. Kalabash, its fintech subsidiary, exists specifically to handle cross-border travel payments across African markets. In July 2024, Wakanow partnered with dLocal to enable local currency checkout across Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Tanzania. “When we sought a payment solution that could handle the complexities of African travel markets, dLocal was a clear choice,” CEO Bayo Adedeji said at the time. Travelstart moved toward mobile-first architecture and progressive web app delivery to address low-bandwidth realities across its markets. Both companies are spending resources solving problems that their counterparts in Europe and Asia Pacific resolved years ago. That cost is real and it compounds.
Booking.com and Expedia are not just competitors. They are entrenched incumbents with structural advantages African OTAs cannot easily replicate.
Booking Holdings and Expedia Group together control over 65% of the global OTA market. Their dominance in Africa is not the result of superior local knowledge. They have none. It is the result of brand trust accumulated over two decades, dispute resolution infrastructure that actually works, and marketing budgets that dwarf anything a Nairobi or Lagos-based OTA can deploy. When an African professional books a flight to London or a hotel in Dubai, they default to Booking.com not because it offers better inventory, but because the implicit guarantee it carries recourse, reliability, recognizable process has no credible local equivalent yet.
This is not irrational consumer behavior. It is rational risk management. In markets where fraud is common, refund processes are opaque, and customer service is unreliable, trust is not a brand attribute. It is the product itself. African OTAs are competing for customers who have already been trained by global platforms to associate reliability with foreign brands. Rebuilding that association takes time and consistent delivery that the infrastructure gaps make harder to achieve.
At the Wakanow Unpacked Expo in Lagos in June 2024, Adedeji framed the access gap with precision: of Africa’s estimated 1.5 billion people, only 19 million travel by air. That number is not just a market size observation. It is a summary of every structural barrier payment friction, trust deficits, thin aviation connectivity compressed into a single statistic.
The inbound problem compounds this further. A British traveler flying to Nairobi books on Booking.com, researches on TripAdvisor, and arranges their itinerary through a specialist operator found via Google. African OTAs are invisible to that entire journey. The structural advantage local platforms hold deeper knowledge of African inventory, regional carrier relationships, understanding of on-the-ground logistics has not been converted into inbound market share because it requires SEO authority, multilingual content, and global distribution partnerships that most have not yet built. Knowing the market and being discoverable to the people who want to enter it are two different capabilities.
Fragmentation is the ceiling Despegar never faced.
Despegar scaled across Latin America by targeting a region with a dominant shared language and a consolidated revenue base; Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia where four markets represented the majority of continental travel spend. Africa offers no equivalent entry point. South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, and Morocco are geographically dispersed, linguistically separate, monetarily distinct, and built on different aviation infrastructure. A traveler booking Lagos to Nairobi crosses a currency boundary, a language boundary, and frequently a GDS content gap where local carrier inventory is inconsistently or incompletely loaded.
Travelstart CFO Handre Oosthuizen signaled the resulting margin pressure in early 2025, noting that the company had shifted its performance marketing philosophy entirely from volume to value to sustain ROI. That is not the language of a company in expansion mode. It is the language of a company optimizing for survival in a market where customer acquisition costs are structurally elevated and conversion rates are structurally suppressed. The unit economics of African OTA expansion are harder than anywhere else in the world, not because the companies are poorly run, but because the environment extracts a premium at every layer.
The path forward is not one move. It is three.
Wakanow’s expansion into nine new markets between April and May 2025 including North America and Europe targets the African diaspora: higher card penetration, proven cross-border travel behavior, and existing affinity for African platforms. It is the most capital-efficient route to building the trust and revenue base needed to fund deeper domestic infrastructure investment. That logic is sound.
The supply side requires equal attention. African OTAs hold inventory knowledge that Booking.com cannot replicate regional carriers, boutique properties, cross-border ground logistics. But that knowledge is worthless to inbound travelers who never encounter it. Distributing African inventory through global GDS channels and metasearch platforms is the structural move that eventually makes inbound market share possible.
The third variable is mobile money. M-Pesa, MTN MoMo, and Wave already move billions across African borders for remittances. When those rails reliably complete travel transactions at scale, the payment wall comes down. The African travel and tourism industry is projected to generate 73% of its revenue through online channels by 2029, per Travelstart’s own market analysis. The platform that captures that shift will not be Booking.com, which has no local inventory advantage, no local payment infrastructure, and no meaningful local trust outside of global brand recognition. It will be whoever has resolved the unglamorous trinity payments, inventory distribution, inbound visibility before the volume arrives.
Wakanow and Travelstart are building toward that inflection point. The question is not whether they are ready. The question is whether Africa’s infrastructure gets there before the window closes.
