Nigeria’s online hotel booking agency has opened an online travel business in a bid to provide solutions to the “hotel booking problems in Africa, and the complexities it has.”
Mark Essien, chief executive officer of Hotels.ng disclosed this in a series of posts on social media platform, Twitter on Monday, 27 February, 2017. According to him, the company had to take the decision due to popular demand from customers to have one-stop travel portal where they not only book their hotel accommodations when they travel to a place, but also facilitate the means of getting to their destinations.
“So why does a hotel booking service have a flights product? The thing is, our customers keep asking for it. We are hotels first, flights second.
“Many people love hotels.ng and want to use it for all their travel. So now instead of directing them elsewhere, we can direct them to us,” Essien said.
Users of the service can book flights from their location to any airport in Nigeria, and around the world. Services include hotel booking, flight reservations, and tourist attractions to visit.
Essien stated that customers who use the Hotels.ng flights service will benefit from better pricing compared to other agencies. Users are able to compare prices of hotels in any city they intend to visit. They can also select a flight with the best fare on their travel days from airlines like Air Peace, Dana Air, Medview Airlines, Emirates, Kenya Airways, etc.
With the launch, Hotels.ng is stepping up its competition with its fiercest rival Jumia which also provides hotel bookings and recently announced it was going into the online travel services. In fact, Monday, will be exactly five days since the e-commerce giant kicked off its flight services for users on its platform.
To give it an advantage, Hotels.ng had launched Spots.ng before the flights service. Spots.ng is a website that the company is hoping will increase monetization of its new platform with its customers by helping with views interesting locations across Nigeria.
Top attractive places include 1212 Polo and Turf, Abuja; Igun-Eronmwon Quarters, Edo; Cultural Centre Complex, Calabar and Campos Minis Stadium, Lagos among others.
