Travelwings.com, an online travel agency which first entered Africa in 2017, with Nigeria as the market of entry, has expanded its footprint across Africa into 27 countries with plans to provide accessible, seamless travel experiences for the nearly 1.2b people on the continent, 60% aged below 25.
Established in 2015 by Albert Fernando, Travelwings is headquartered in Dubai with offices across Africa and has recorded over three hundred thousand (300,000) bookings annually, catered to over 1 million travellers in over 32 nations including the Middle East, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, Morocco, Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and Mauritius.
Travelwings has diversified its core businesses beyond airlines, apartments, hotels and vacation rentals, to tours, activities, packages, and much more providing its customers with customised packages, unique travel experiences, and specially Curated Packages.
Travelwings aims to offer a wholesome travel experience by introducing services like holidays, accommodation, flights, transportation, activities, Visa services, PCR test bookings and more, making it the perfect one-stop travel shop for travelers from Egypt to South Africa. The firm offers local payment solutions in Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
“There are 1.2b people, 60% aged below 25 and apart from Kenya, Nigeria, Mauritius and South Africa, there are no real online platforms. How can we facilitate that? We want to be the market leader to transform things.” said Fernando, who himself started as a reservations staff at Dnata, Dubai, before being the firm’s global head of e-commerce, and later moving on to start Travelwings with the help of the travel conglomerate, Satguru Travel Group.
Travelwinds build on Satguru whose travel network covered more than 70 countries worldwide, and has investments in B2B consolidator (Toptraveltrip.com), Dubai’s Orient Tours among others. Travelwings is now present in 32 countries, 27 of which are in Africa, “and Travelwings a top OTA in 19 of them with local payment solutions which he says are a door opener to the African continent.
“You need local payments, local call centres, local pricing,” he said. “It took us a while to get this right, the learning curve was long and steep but we are now integrated with 17 banks across 27 countries. Take Nigeria, for example. This market has 200m people and less than 2.5m travellers and they all go to UK, US and Dubai – and it’s hard for them to get visa to these places. If we educate the consumers, and give them access to affordable travel, we can increase the travel landscape.”
“Africa has always been our focus. We believe we can grow the travel market from a $9.8b market to $18b. There are lots of opportunities. We also need to get people exposed to Africa as a destination – Kenya, South Africa, Mauritius, Seychelles, so many beautiful destinations,” he said.
In October last year Travelwings.com unveiled its new base of operations in Lekki, Lagos to meet its growing demand in the state.
Speaking at the event, Amanpreet Singh (Chief Commercial Officer) stated, “We are extremely excited about our successful expansion into Lekki, Lagos. We have received positive feedback from our operations in Ikeja. It is a pleasure for us to bring our operations to prospective travellers in and around the Lekki and we look forward to giving our customers the best travel service possible.”