Nigeria’s Hotel.ng is Helping Nigerians to Book Hotels and Make Reservations from their Convenient Spots
Hotels.ng is Nigeria’s first and largest hotel booking platform was launched in 2013, and founded by Mark Essien, who developed interest in the Nigerian technology space when he was studying for his Msc. in computer science at the free University of Berlin. His analysis showed that for an emerging market like Nigeria, a travel/tourism startup would work the quickest.
Using the models of already established hotel booking agencies, Mark created a hotel listing platform which is now hotels.ng and as soon as the hotels were listed, bookings were enabled, in fact, it was said that users began making reservations from the first day bookings were enabled. The platform makes it convenient for Nigerians to make reservations and find the right bookings for their location and needs at any given time.
On May 26, 2015 Hotels.ng received a 1.2$ million startup funding from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar Network and from EchoVC Pan-African fund. The funding follows from the announcement of a profitable 2014 in Hotels.ng, where platform was said to have ostensibly made $40,000 in monthly revenue in the last half of the year.
The agency employs 49 locally-working staff in its Yaba office and outsources and crowdsources its data collection to freelance workers and boasts confidently to list over 7,138 hotels from 320 cities in Nigeria. In January 2018, Hotels.ng launched Hotel.africa and Fly.africa as part of its expansion plans across Africa.
