Hotel booking site raises $1.2 million

folarin okunola

May 26, 2015 12:55 PM

Lagos-based Hotels.ng, founded in 2013 by Nigerian entrepreneur Mark Essien, aims to provide affordable, safe and convenient online bookings for Nigerian hotels.

Founder of Hotels.ng, Mark Essien

According to reports, leading hotel booking website, Hotels.ng, has raised $1.2 million from the Omidyar Network, the investment vehicle of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and EchoVC Pan-Africa Fund, a seed-stage technology fund.

Lagos-based Hotels.ng, founded in 2013 by Nigerian entrepreneur Mark Essien, aims to provide affordable, safe and convenient online bookings for Nigerian hotels for both tourist and business travelers.

It has a listing of more than 7,000 hotels in 21 regions across Nigeria and has facilitated up to two million hotel reservations since its inception.

In 2013, Lagos-based business accelerator Spark, made a seed investment of $225,000 in the company, making this the second time the company is raising money. The company seems to be already profitable, though Essien refuses to disclose revenue figures.

“We’re forging ahead into relatively uncharted territory; E-commerce in Africa is a massive market to conquer, but there are no hard and fast prototypes from which to follow; We cannot simply replicate Western models here; we have to build our own blueprints from scratch, which takes significant investment, both in terms of time and money,"

"This additional capital will allow us to realize the next stage in our ambitious growth plans, which will see us consolidate our position as Nigeria’s market leader in online hotel bookings, with a view to expanding our service into other African markets, such as Ghana.” said Essien as reported by Forbes.

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