Marek Zmyslwoski, the founder and managing director of Jovago Limited, a hotel booking company with a focus on providing best rate services to over 20,000 hotels across the continent spoke with RITA OHAI on his ‘óyinbo vision’ for a black continent and the factors stifling the development of the local business sector.
Moving to Lagos to launch Jovago was a huge leap of faith for Marek.
For many years, he had spent most of his time building online businesses in native Poland and at the end of 2012, he decided he was ready to establish an international brand.
He sold two of his companies and was prepared to jet off to Silicon Valley, United States when fate tossed him a curve ball.
On a short trip to France, he met people from Rocket Internet – who in partnership with MTN and Millicom form a mega-group known as the ‘Africa Internet Holding’, operators of eight companies across ten countries worldwide.
They sold him the concept of breaking ground in an untapped market. He bought it, made a few changes on his itinerary and Jovago was born. Since then Zmyslowski has had the craziest yet amazing experiences.
Having successfully established and sold companies in climes where essential infrastructural amenities like electricity and constant internet services are cheap and abundant in supply, it was a bit of a culture shock arriving in a country where things he considered pedestrian suddenly became scarce commodity.
In what many would tag an amusing situation, Marek finds it strange that out of more than 8,000 hotels in Nigeria “only about 1,000 check their e-mails each day and sometimes the phone-lines do not even work!”
He also thinks it incredulous, especially since moving from the freezing cold of Poland to the blistering heat of Africa, that investors spend more time and money sorting through peripheral operations that should ordinarily be taken care of by third-party institutions, with little or no time left to build the company.
Sharing his most wearisome challenge beyond tech-infrastructure, he said, “From my perspective, it is the education of the consuming market. You may say that there are 40 million people here who use the internet on a daily basis but the question is, ‘how many of them are willing to book for a service online or pay for a commodity online without seeing that product first?’
“At the moment, we are at the very early stage of what I call ‘customer conscience’. Remember how hard it was to get people to use ATM’s because people did not believe that they could actually hold their cards and get money from a wall. This is also what we are experiencing in e-commerce and there needs to be a change in behaviour,” he said.
This ‘attitude’ towards e-commerce has become his toughest nut to crack and poetically, his biggest competitor; blanching other brands into insignificance.
While still reeling from the trials of efficiently running a business this part of the Sub-Sahara, Marek chose to make a few submissions to government agencies regulating activities in sectors that affect local and foreign investments.
“The government needs to properly regulate the online payments system by making sure that the products released by payment operators are working properly and are also not too expensive,” he says.
“There is also the problem of accessibility to data and a standardized system of ratings in Nigeria.
“An example of the impact of enforcing a standardized system of rating in any develop country from France to other parts of the world shows that once you introduce the standardized ratings it will eventually make the average quality of the services better,” Zmyslowski explained.
Although finance analyst project the ICT sector to take the biggest hit from the impact of the plunge in the value of the naira owing to the reality that e-commerce is often considered a luxury venture, Marek is determined to stay objective and positive as he prepares Jovago for the defining phase ahead.
One of the strategies he is putting to play is in expanding the foreign clientele portfolio base for the company especially since Nigeria operates a dollar denominated forex placing the spending muscle in the hands westerners and Europeans just like himself.
In his words, “I do not see the economic downturn making any long term impact on our business as Jovago.
“Our foreign travellers have much more money to spend because their purchasing power (in dollars) is stronger. Although some of the international hotels are already changing their prices because they need to import some of the products they use but there is no fundamental reason for the (economic) swing to be permanent,” he said.
As for his 5 year plan for the brand, the Polish man is focusing on scaling a feat that makes even his competition quiver – creating the biggest inventory for hotels in Africa.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
With the current drive for business expansion in frontier markets like Nigeria taking Europe by storm, Jovago is set to entrench its brand presence in cities across the continent.
“Right now,” Zmyslowski says, “we have offices in Lagos, Accra and Senegal but we are set to position representatives in 51 other countries across Africa while ensuring that we deliver the best customer service possible.”
Wondering how achievable this expedition will be? Only time will tell.
