Lessons from a “mediocre business” that changed everything
Around 2014, I built something that looked great on paper but barely made money: a domestic flight aggregator for East African airlines.
We were selling 6 figures worth of flights every month. At one point, we became the biggest agent for some of these airlines. But after paying for online advertising and covering our costs, we were left with around 1% in profit.
If I’m being honest, it was a mediocre business. But what I learned from running it became the foundation for everything EasyOTA does today.
The Race to the Bottom
The flight aggregator world is brutal. Travellers don’t care about service or expertise, they just want the cheapest ticket. If your platform shows a flight for 50 cents more than a competitor, they’ll go elsewhere without thinking twice.
We quickly realised we couldn’t win on price. The margins were too thin, and the competition was too fierce. But we could win on something else: making the booking process actually work.
Where the Real Learning Happened
While we weren’t making much money, we were processing thousands of transactions. And that gave us an education you can’t get from a business school or a tech conference.
We learned about payments in East Africa, how to handle fraud, how to structure deposits so people would actually complete bookings. We worked extensively with payment providers to improve their fraud detection processes. We figured out why charging $5,000 upfront on a website doesn’t work, but charging a $500 deposit does.
We discovered that UK travellers want to pay in pounds, not dollars. That multi-currency isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s essential for conversion. That the value of a sale matters just as much as the price.
These weren’t theoretical lessons. They came from watching real bookings fail, real customers abandon carts, and real businesses lose revenue because the technology didn’t support how people actually wanted to buy.
The Pattern I Started to See
Here’s what struck me: the airlines thought we were amazing. We were sending them tens of thousands of dollars in business every month. But from a pure profit perspective, we were struggling.
The real value wasn’t in the commissions we earned. It was in the knowledge we were building about how to make online bookings successful in this part of the world.
And that knowledge applied to far more than just flights.
When Everything Connected
By this time, I’d already built hotel reservation systems, car hire booking engines, and experience booking platforms. Each one taught me something different about the travel industry.
But the flight aggregator was special because it forced me to solve the hardest problems: real-time availability, instant confirmation, secure payments, multi-currency transactions, and fraud prevention.
When a hotel owner who ran The Rock Restaurant in Zanzibar came to me asking for a booking system, I realised the hotel software we’d built wouldn’t work. What he needed was something that could handle the complexity of experiences, the volume of transactions, and the speed of confirmation that I’d learned from the flight business.
That’s when the idea for EasyOTA truly took shape.
What Safari Booking Really Needs
Safari bookings are nothing like flights. They’re complex, bespoke, and high-touch. But travellers still expect the same speed and reliability they get when booking a plane ticket.
The lessons from the flight aggregator showed me what safari operators need:
Speed to confirmation matters. Even for complex itineraries, people want answers quickly. The “I’ll check and get back to you” approach loses bookings.
Deposits drive conversion. Asking for 10% upfront is far more effective than demanding full payment. It lowers the psychological barrier and reduces payment friction.
Multi-currency isn’t optional. If you want to sell globally, you need to let people pay in their own currency. It’s not about convenience, it’s about conversion.
Fraud protection must be built in. Online booking only works if both sides trust the transaction. That means proper payment gateway integration and security from day one.
Real-time availability changes everything. When you can confirm instantly, you close bookings that would otherwise go to competitors.
The Mediocre Business That Wasn’t
Looking back, I don’t regret the flight aggregator even though it never made us wealthy. It taught me more about the realities of online travel booking than any successful business could have.
Every failed transaction, every frustrated customer, every technical challenge we had to solve, all of it went into making EasyOTA better prepared for what safari businesses actually need.
Because here’s the thing: safari operators shouldn’t have to learn these lessons the hard way. They shouldn’t have to build their own payment systems, figure out multi-currency on their own, or lose bookings because their technology can’t keep up with customer expectations.
That’s why we built EasyOTA. To take everything we learned from hotels, car hire, flights, and experiences, and create a platform that handles the complexity so operators can focus on delivering incredible safaris.
The Bigger Picture
The safari industry has something most online businesses don’t: genuine magic. The sunsets, the wildlife, the once-in-a-lifetime moments. That’s irreplaceable.
But if the booking process is slow, confusing, or unprofessional, travellers will take their dream safari somewhere else. Not because your safaris aren’t incredible, but because someone else made it easier to say yes.
Technology should never replace the heart of safari. But it should make it easier for the world to experience it.
That’s what a “mediocre” flight business taught me. And that’s what drives EasyOTA today.
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