I tried to hide the excitement on my face as we were ushered into the small, compact yet cozy office of this 6 ft 5 Polish gentleman that came out to greet us. I hadn’t proper prior knowledge of their business operations before now so I was enthusiastic to hear the details from the boss himself, Marek Zmyslowski, Managing Director of Jovago.com, Africa’s biggest, largest hotel booking platform.

I wasn’t alone on this quest, armed with an audio recorder was my friend, partner and business colleague Blaise Aboh, founder of TheBusinessaim. These two gentlemen shared one similar trait; the grit, gumption and glint in their eyes sparking like that flint that bore fire and desire to stamp a foot hold on the online start-up market.

Simple, calm and as warmly as he could, he gently took us down memory lane on the interesting journey of how he got to this hot seat as the manager of such a big and successful company.

Hear it from this jovial entrepreneur.

So please do tell us who you are and what are you doing at Rocket Internet’s Lekki office?

My name is Marek Zmyslowski, Managing Director of Jovago.com, Africa’s No. 1 hotel booking portal.

When did Jovago start their operations in Nigeria?

Jovago kicked off its operations in May 2013; I was their employee No. 1.
August 5th, 2013 was the official launch of Jovago, which was when our website went live.

Does Jovago have other branches? How often do customers patronize you on daily basis?

Jovago is in four (4) countries now. We have four (4) Headquarters. One of them is Lagos (we started Jovago here), we opened a HQ for East Africa in Nairobi, for West African French speaking countries, we have one in Dakar in Senegal, & also an office in Pakistan. On a daily basis, we have around 700 booking; about 75% are from Nigeria. That is the biggest grant we have here.

What’s the number of staff employed by Jovago in all these countries?

In Nigeria we have 30 people in the office. We have 1 or 2 representative in every state depending on how big the state is; so in total we have roughly about 70-75 staff in the country. When you combine Senegal, Kenya and Pakistan, we have over 200.

How many Nigerian hotels are registered to Jovago currently and how does Jovago register hotels?

In Nigeria, we have 4680 signed hotels but 4281 are live.

The reason for the discrepancy in the number of signed hotels to number of live hotels is as a result of the time it takes to complete the signing and verification process.
Jovago registers her hotel firstly by drawing up a contract document where all parties involved would have to sign.

Then we send a Jovago representative to inspect the hotel’s property and facilities available. He would take detailed pictures of the rooms, swimming pool, restaurant and other hotel facilities for proof and record purposes.

We want to ensure that our prospective customers actually get to enjoy all the facilities seen on our website, in reality. We carry out this process for every hotel that is to be listed on our online platform.

Since Jovago is just a booking portal, and not a hotel rendering services, how does Jovago make their money?
We make money by helping hotels make more money.

How do we do this? Simple; we send them customers. There are many customers who the hotels probably wouldn’t have found if Jovago didn’t find them. The hotel shares part of the revenue with us.

We can do it in two ways. A customer can choose the pre-paid option. He/she books for a room online and pays for it through our various payment gates like Simple Pay, Flow Cash, Global Pay using a credit card or Nigerian debit card. We receive the money and pay the hotel for the room whilst ensuring that the room is kept for the customer.

On the other hand, when the customer chooses a post payment option, he/she goes to the hotel and pays directly. When this happens, we send an invoice to the hotel requesting for our commission.

If the hotel does a good job by rendering exceptional services to the customer, there is a high probability he/she would patronize the hotel again.

Does the platform presently have an app for booking?

No, not yet. We believe in mobile first approach. So first, we are optimizing our mobile version of the website. For us, a mobile application is like a second stage.



What marketing strategy does Jovago employ to get the word out there? What is the company doing to sensitize the public about your business operations?

As we all know, Nigerians are yet to get a hang of the online buzz.

It would interest you to know that 5% of our customers are gotten online, while 95% are gotten offline. We are doing this huge amount of work that would prepare the market, so what we do is approach people who are not using the smart phones or laptops yet to order stuff online, and teach them how to do it.

One of the things we introduced was to meet airlines because they are qualified customers for us. For instance when someone is flying from Lagos to Abuja, he would probably need a hotel.

See more: - http://thebusinessaim.com.ng/nigeria-is-a-paradise-for-adventurous-entrepreneurs-a-chat-with-marek-zmyslowski-md-jovago/