ventureburn.com - 

Ex-Jumia and Konga executive Onyeka Akumah and others have launched TravelBeta (“beta” pronounced as pidgin English for “better”), a platform that seeks to disrupt Nigeria’s online booking space. Akumah is joined by Wole Ayorinde, who has worked in Silicon Valley for 13 years and is TravelBeta’s Chief Technology Officer. Another member of the team is David Asuku, the company’s operations manager who for the past 15 years has worked with TravelBeta’s major competitors — Wakanow and Holloway Travels.

The new platform will seek to compete in a space dominated by industry heavyweights including Wakanow, Travelstart, Hotels.ng and Jovago. But the experienced founders said they are aiming to convert Nigeria’s several millions of offline booking customers to those that are using the online platform to make their travel bookings.

“Nigeria recorded approximately 15 million travel bookings in the last 12 months,” the team revealed. Breaking down the industry figures, the team added that nine million international flights were booked during the past twelve months, out of which only 300 000 were booked online.

The team wants to change this.