SlimTrader, the turn-key ecommerce solution provider for Sub-Saharan Africa, has launched a White Label Rewards scheme, Mo’Rewardz Club, for its ecommerce platform, MoBiashara.
Aggregating the 1,500+ hotels it currently powers across Africa, MoBiashara is introducing the add-on loyalty programme to simultaneously reward guests and hotel staff for using the e-commerce platform.
In stark contrast to traditional loyalty schemes, where customers are rewarded for their loyalty to either a hotel chain or a third party booking site, Mo’Rewardz is brand & sales channel agnostic, allowing travelers and hotels to accrue points via any first or third party sellers that use the MoBiashara online reservation system.
At present, these include Trip Advisor, HotelNowNow, Lagos Oriental Hotel, Protea Hotels and the Maison Fahrenheit Hotels. Guests are rewarded with points for each reservation, which can be used towards future reservations, to buy mobile airtime, pay bills and can even be cashed out by the guest. Front desk staff receive loyalty points for creating reservations on the MoBiashara for Hotels Admin area and checking in guests with the system when guests arrive on the hotel’s premises
The Mo’Rewardz model, currently being rolled out by SlimTrader, is the first of its kind globally and has been developed with the African hotel market in mind, which is dominated by tens of thousands of independent hotels, guesthouses and small chains, interspersed with only a few of the large global hotel brands that are historically associated with loyalty schemes, and 37% of hotels on the MoBiashara platform are independent local chains.
SlimTrader’s founder and CEO, Femi Akinde said: “Aggregating Africa’s fragmented network of hotels under one loyalty programme is a big step for the travel market. The launch of this new feature signifies, for us, the maturing of Africa’s hotel & travel sector, as we work more strategically with hotels large and small to deliver choices and incentives for a new class of traveler on the continent, who expects more from their travels.
“The travel loyalty industry is currently worth billions in the West, but has barely any visibility or travel market impact in Africa. Our Mo’Rewardz loyalty programme, as well as our seamless e-commerce reservation system, makes us the go-to platform for the sector, and with this new product launch for the MoBiashara platform, we expect to onboard thousands more hotels over the next 12 months, many of whom have, until now, been unable to activate a loyalty programme as they feel they are too small. We are uniting the Davids and the Goliaths of Africa’s growing hotel market, under one loyalty scheme that is mutually beneficial to both hotels and travelers.”
Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, has a fast-growing hotels sector with over 7,000 hotels (245,000 hotel rooms) and is worth $3BN (N562B in 2014 – Agusto and Co.). 80% of reservations in the country are local corporate / business travellers.
MoBiashara, which literally means ‘More Business’ in Swahili, provides a fully customisable search, inventory, booking and payment back end platform for over 1,500 hotels across Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda and Kenya. The Lagos-based company, which also has offices in Seattle, closed on $1M of funding from Interswitch Fund in September 2015 and is investing heavily in technology and onboarding new hotels and hotel platforms, across Africa.
GB&F
