Johnny ‘the prolific’, saying AirBnB don’t offer [limited] tour guides or extended local experiences means you haven’t been keeping abreast with recent developments.
Nigeria isn’t a vacationing country nor is it a destination. If you’re are in the business to leverage movements of people into and around the country look towards business people and offer services targeted at them as they settle into the country whether for a week or a year and as they move.around.
@87_chuks. Thank you for your comment. First, Airbnb has not started tour guides yet. They are still beta testing tour guides in San Francisco, Paris and London at the moment. They are in Private Beta. I knew when they started trying the idea. It was last year and they officially just entered the Private Beta testing on the 15th of May this year. If you go to their website, you will find that tour guides are not visible there. It’s because they are in Private Bata.
Secondly, like you noted, Nigeria is not a tourist destination yet. However, we plan to change that in Nigeria by gradually making Nigeria a destination country, with our offerings; which is part of our global business. We don’t expect a miracle to happen. It has to be gradual.
Nigeria has a lot to offer when it comes to tourism and you will see a lot of what Nigeria has to offer on our platform when the time comes. Nigeria is blessed with a lot of tourist attractions.
Furthermore, there are many unemployed Nigerians that can make a living offering guides to tourists. That where we want to start.
Was there a singular platform for job seekers and recruiters to meet online before jobberman? Was booking hotels online a lucrative idea before Mark Essien plunged into it? Many hotels then didn’t have good websites while those that had websites never had good pictures to portray what they had.
That market doesn’t vividly exist for an idea is not enough reason to completely shut it down. The chemist who found Coca cola sold it how for much then? If he had the foresight to grow his ‘sham’ idea back then, can you imagine the kind of wealth that would be running through his generations now?
Vacation hosting Nigeria is launching a new horizons for possibilities, many opportunities for those who see challenges as learning curve will emerge. I believe it will work. Let us help out the little way we could, not condemn.
My 100%Cent though, no confrontation intended! Lol
@obadeyemi. That’s right. Like they say, Rome was not built in a day. The city of Rome started from scratch and gradually became a city that it is today.
Business is a risky venture. However, if no one ventures into business, there would be no business anywhere today. There would be no companies as we know them today. Someone had to take the risk then and someone has to make a move into a new frontier now. Nobody will succeed, if everybody is afraid to fail. That’s what business is all about.
…and that was part of the service void that became Hotels.ng
That’s a lot of horizons. They want to play in flights, vacation rentals (even hotels.ng which is better placed may only offer this as OTC now), all kinds of pickup derivative (from car pool to road courier), local tour packages, events and shopping …i’d have to stop here.
Its like they recently just discovered the internet.
Bro, what features does your MVP have; I’ll advise you test few but core features the most profitable segment of your target customers would effortlessly make use of, and then iterate from there.
“If you are not failing at all, you haven’t tried something new.”
Even blind date is a test of faith. Businesses that never stop growing never stop earning. Growth comes with pain of rising after falling.
It’s the sharing economy concept that actually got me. I’m sorry to say we are wasteful by nature. So many things we pay through our nose for could be shared with others or basically be recycled from what we have disposed.
Some of us have big houses that are empty while some families of 6 live in cubicles. Let the resource sharing culture be encouraged abeg!
Vacation Hosting Naija all the way. And all the best to Johnny and his team.
@obadeyemi. Exactly. The world is moving away from ownership and towards sharing. In the coming years, vitually everything will be shared. Just like you’ve observed, a lot assets are wasting away due to lack of use.
There are several rooms in homes around the world, including Nigeria, that are hardly used. A lot of people leave their cars parked for a long time, either at home or at work and when they travel, while some people have more than one car. Furthermore, there is traffic congestion in Nigeria and around the world, due to too many cars and fewer roads, thus necessitating car pooling.
Same thing with assets like boats around the world that are just sitting on waters. A lot of surveys have been conducted around the world, where a lot of people indicated that they would rather share than own properties or any other assets in this millennium. They prefer rentals to buying. That’s where we come in.
@obadeyemi, furthermore, hotel rates are too high in Nigeria. A lot of local and foreign travellers in Nigeria cannot afford the exorbitant prices charged by hotels in Nigeria. Nigerian hotels have the most ridiculous prices in the whole world.
Our offerings will allow any one on budget to find affordable accommodation anywhere in Nigeria. Furthermore, travellers will get a chance to stay with locals and have access to kitchens and living spaces that are not readily available at hotels in Nigeria.
Finally, they can plan and manage their entire trip on our platform: from where to stay, what to do, what to see, what to eat, how to move from place to place and even concierges that will help them with what they need right on our site, without the need to jump from one site to another.
I thought of journalists, peepz in protocol and logistics profession. they sure travel around a lot. This will afford them nice places to stay and save them some cash.
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We’ve just sent out Invitation Codes to the fourth batch of people who have requested invites on Vacationhosting.com.ng. Please check your Inbox or Spam Box for your code. If you did not receive your code or unable to locate your code, please let us know on Radar or email us at customerexperience@vacationhosting.com.ng and we’ll generate a new code for you.