The tourism sector will soon register growth in the numbers of visitors coming to Kenya from outside the country after the booking and payment of different flights into the country and to other local destinations was made easier.
This has been made possible by the use of a single website where tourists from outside the country can book their flights into the country and their inter-connecting flights to their tour destination.
DPO Group CEO Eran Feinstein said that they provide payment solutions across the continent by facilitating payments between customers and airlines, between airlines and agents, hotels and vice versa.
Feinstein said that they use top notch technology where customers can book different interconnecting flights on one website and only pay once instead of the earlier scenarios where they had to call local travel agents to book the flights for them and paying different airlines.
“We combine carriers from small local airlines to the big airlines and the company takes care of the different payments in different currencies. This will open Africa to the world and the world to Africa and enable door to door transportation across the world,” he explained.
He added that they manage for the customer and airlines fraud and risk so that the customer will be able to pay very easily anywhere in Africa and in the world with convenience through a safe and secure system.
“We have a presence in 15 countries in East, South and West Africa and highly specialize in local routes. In three clicks one can book a flight and use local payment solution like Mpesa, credit card or combine both to reach the required amount,” he explained adding that they have different language options including Kiswahili.
Aero CRS Founder and CEO Meir Turner said that they host 62 airlines worldwide majority of which are in Africa especially in Kenya and Tanzania. They started with Air Kenya and they grew to other regions like Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean.
“There are about 800 airlines in the small and medium capacity category and this is our main focus now to grow to working with tier 2 and tier 3 airlines which carry more than three million passengers per year,” said Turner.
He said that they offer different products for airlines including inventory, revenue, frequent flier, internet booking, engine solutions so that the airlines don’t need to train their local agencies since all they have to do is to give them the system and password and they get started.
By Joseph Ng’ang’a