Hotels.ng is a Nigerian online hotels booking agency which was launched in 2013. The platform was founded by Mark Essien who hails from

Akwa Ibom State Akwa Ibom State is a state in the South-South geopolitical zone of Nigeria, bordered on the east by Cross River State, on the west by Rivers State and Abia State, and on the south by the Atlantic Ocean. The state takes its name from the Qua Iboe ...

, Nigeria and claims to list over 7,138 hotels from 320 cities in Nigeria.

History

In 2012, while Mark Essien was studying for his MSc. in Computer Science at the

Free University of Berlin The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in political science and t ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

, he developed an interest in the Nigerian technology space. His analysis showed that for an emerging market like Nigeria, a travel/tourism startup would work the quickest. Studying South American and Asian models of already-established hotels booking agencies, Mark tentatively created a hotels listing platform (which was what Hotels.ng was, initially.) He purchased a domain name and a list of hotels and put them up on the website. This domain recorded enough traffic numbers to convince Mark to return to Nigeria from Germany. In

Calabar Calabar (also referred to as Callabar, Calabari, Calbari and Kalabar) is the capital city of Cross River State, Nigeria. It was originally named Akwa Akpa, in the Efik language. The city is adjacent to the Calabar and Great Kwa rivers and c ...

, he continued to list more hotels. He partnered with a friend and they started taking photographs of hotels and signing agreements with as many hotels in Calabar as they could find. As soon as they had enough hotels listed, bookings were enabled on Hotels.ng. Mark says that users began making reservations from the first day bookings were enabled.

Seed Fund

Shortly after the launch of Hotels.ng, Mark published a few press articles that caught the attention of Iroko TV's founder,

Jason Njoku Jason Chukwuma Njoku (born 11 December 1980) is a British-Nigerian businessman. He is the co-founder and CEO of iROKOtv, a video-on-demand service for Nigerian movies. A self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur, iROKOtv was Njoku's 11th attempt a ...

. At the time, he (Jason) was beginning a startup fund (Spark.ng) and looking for good internet businesses to invest in. After negotiations, Spark.ng made a first investment of $75,000 in Hotels.ng which prompted Mark to move to Lagos to set up the platform there. A few months after the initial investment, the Spark fund made another investment of $150,000.

Startup Fund

On May 26, 2015, Hotels.ng received a $1.2 million startup funding from

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

founder Pierre Omidyar's

Omidyar Network Omidyar Network is a self-styled " philanthropic investment firm," composed of a foundation and an impact investment firm. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, Omidyar Network has committed over $1.5billion to ...

and from EchoVC Pan-African fund. The funding follows from the announcement of a profitable 2014 in Hotels.ng, where the platform was said to have ostensibly made $40,000 in monthly revenue in the last half of the year.

Staff

Hotels.ng employs 49 locally-working staff in its Yaba office and outsources and crowdsources its data collection to freelance workers.

Expansion

In January 2018, Hotels.ng launched Hotel.africa and Fly.africa as part of its expansion plans across Africa.

External links

Hotel.africa Homepage

Hotels.ng Homepage

Hotels.ng raises $1.2Million in Funding

Hotels.ng Founder, Mark Essien is proof that Nigerian Technical Founders can make great CEOs

Hotels.ng and 35 other Nigerian Startups make it to SpeedUP Africa’s bootcamp in Ghana

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/nowiki>">HOTOS">Checkout Hotels.ng’s awesome new office space in Yaba [PHOTOS
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References

{{reflist Nigerian travel websites Companies based in Lagos Hospitality companies of Nigeria