🇰🇪 A week late, an after-the-fact post on The Hotel Expo, and why distribution and payments will consolidate the link between East Africa and Europe.
Written from the Coast, after six days of follow-ups. I was at THX in Nairobi on the opening keynote panel and presenting TTM on stage; what follows is the argument that survived the meetings afterwards.
Nobody builds a Maasai Mara: you can’t manufacture the thing East Africa actually sells. And “welcome”, karibu, is a disposition: you cannot write it into a brand standard, and you notice it ten minutes after landing from Europe.
So the product is unrepeatable and the hospitality, in the literal sense of the word, is world class. Every system in between was built somewhere else, for somebody else’s business model. Three things I kept hearing last week, in Nairobi, Mombasa and Diani:
It takes 39 days on average for a hotel commission to reach the agency that earned it, from checkout, and 140 days for hotels outside a payment network (Onyx CenterSource, Q1 2026), because somebody has to remember to fund the payment. Most properties I sat with and every activity operator I met added the mirror image: friction with money owed out of Europe.
The extras that are the real core of the experience get sold at the front desk, after arrival: the dhow, the dive, the Mara leg. By then the guest has already decided how much trip they were buying. Offered in Europe at booking, the same product behaves completely differently, and a good share of the margin sits in a part of the funnel local operators cannot reach outside TO relationships.
For a small coastal property, the cost of making those relationships work, and being paid, makes serious international distribution not worth doing. Not difficult: not worth doing.
The gap is in the plumbing between here and the origin markets that already like it here: Italy and Germany alone sent close to 180,000 arrivals in 2024 (Tourism Research Institute). Which is the only reason emerging tech is interesting in this room: it takes hands out of the middle. Fewer intermediaries, shorter wait, less FX, no chasing.
And it only stays interesting if it disappears behind the people doing the work. Barry Clemens spent his keynote on how that becomes a globally competitive product, by working on the people and processes around them. With Dr. David Gachuru (PhD) the discussion was on how AI and emerging tech apply, from decades of insider experience. Håvar Bauck has been building distribution plumbing for African hotels long enough to be usefully sceptical of anyone turning up with a new layer, and his hour on which parts of the guest journey to automate or keep human was the most grounded session of the show.
Good to see partnerships that landed on the ground and not just in a press release: my colleagues at Travel Token Marketplace GmbH, Transio and Elementpay are the reason most of last week’s meetings happened.
#payments #distribution #EastAfrica #traveltech
