TripZapp: Payments, Coordination, and the Reality of African Travel Tech

For years, travel tech has been about reducing friction: fewer emails, fewer middlemen, fewer “can you send the bank details again?” moments between a traveller and the people actually delivering the experience. A BBC report on Nigerian entrepreneur Rory Okoli and her start-up TripZapp is a small snapshot of that bigger shift—using modern payment and productivity tools to make it easier to discover, book, and pay for trips across Africa.

What makes the idea interesting isn’t that it’s an “app for travel” (there are plenty). It’s the attempt to connect tourists directly to locally owned businesses in markets where trust, payments, and coordination can be harder than the adventure itself.

The problem TripZapp is trying to solve: coordination, not inspiration

Most travellers don’t struggle to want a trip. They struggle to organise one.

The BBC says Okoli’s background in Nigeria’s hospitality industry, plus her own travel across Africa, showed her that it was not always easy for tourists to plan African trips. The challenge isn’t only information; it’s stitching together multiple moving parts:

finding credible local operators
confirming what is and isn’t included
working out availability
paying in a way that is safe and convenient
keeping the plan coherent as people, transport, and weather change

In practice, this is what makes many trips feel “hard”: the user is doing the work of a travel coordinator.

TripZapp’s stated goal is to make it simple for travellers to find, book, and pay for African travel—especially by connecting locally owned businesses with tourists.

Why payments are the real bottleneck in cross-border travel

The BBC notes that making TripZapp work involved integrating “the latest payment and productivity tools” into the company’s operations.

That detail matters because payments are often the hidden reason travel marketplaces fail.

When a traveller cannot pay easily, everything else becomes a workaround: screenshots, bank transfers, “pay on arrival” promises, or asking a friend to pay locally. Those workarounds increase the chances of misunderstandings and disputes, and they make it harder for small operators to scale beyond a familiar customer base.

A travel platform that can reliably handle booking and payment does three things at once:

It lowers the anxiety cost of committing (a traveller can pay using a method they recognise).
It reduces administrative drag for local businesses (less manual tracking of deposits, dates, and confirmations).
It creates a record of what was agreed (useful for customer service and trust).

Even when the payments layer is “invisible” to users, it is often the main engineering and operational burden behind a marketplace.

Connecting tourists to locally owned businesses: what changes and what doesn’t

TripZapp’s focus on locally owned businesses is the most important strategic choice described by the BBC.

In most travel ecosystems, locally run operators are the ones with the deepest knowledge (they know the real logistics, the seasonality, the safety issues, the alternative routes). But they’re also the ones most likely to be disadvantaged by distribution: they may not have the marketing reach, online booking systems, or cross-border payment options that large international travel companies take for granted.

A marketplace that connects tourists to local firms can, in principle, shift value toward operators on the ground. But it doesn’t remove the hard parts. Someone still needs to handle:

vetting and quality control
clear listings and policies
handling cancellations and edge cases
customer support when plans break

A travel platform doesn’t make those problems disappear—it decides where they live. The best ones make them predictable.

What TripZapp sells: experiences that travel well online

The BBC gives concrete examples of the kinds of adventures TripZapp offers:

swimming with turtles in Zanzibar
hot air balloon rides in Egypt

These examples are revealing because they are “experience-shaped.” They’re easy for a traveller to understand quickly, and they translate well into online listings.

That’s a common pattern in travel marketplaces: experiences that have a clear narrative (“I did this, here, with these photos”) are often easier to market than complex multi-day itineraries. They also lend themselves to standardised pricing and scheduling.

For locally owned businesses, being listed for experience-style products can be a first step toward going digital without having to build a full booking system themselves.

The operational layer: productivity tools as a competitive advantage

The BBC describes TripZapp integrating payment and productivity tools into operations.

Productivity tools sound mundane, but in marketplaces they can be decisive. A platform might have a beautiful app, but if the back office cannot reliably:

confirm availability
send reminders
reconcile payments
coordinate changes

…then the “tech” stops at the surface.

Operational tooling is often where a young company quietly differentiates. It can make response times faster, reduce errors, and allow the business to grow without scaling headcount linearly.

The two-sided marketplace challenge (and why “just list it online” isn’t enough)

Travel platforms have a structural problem: they aren’t selling a product they control. They are coordinating independent suppliers and customers with different expectations.

For a company like TripZapp, that means success depends on more than customer acquisition. It also depends on a steady supply of experiences that are accurately described, consistently delivered, and available when the calendar says they are.

That is harder than it sounds. In many destinations, a locally owned operator may be excellent at delivering the experience but may not run their business in a way that naturally fits online booking. Schedules might be managed in WhatsApp messages, availability might change quickly, and pricing might be negotiated rather than fixed.

A marketplace has to translate that reality into something travellers can trust:

Standardisation without flattening the experience
Availability management that doesn’t overpromise
Clear terms for cancellations and changes

When people say “the platform is the product,” this is what they mean: the platform is doing the messy coordination work on behalf of both sides.

Payments are also about payouts: getting money to operators reliably

There’s another side to “payments” that travellers rarely see: paying out to suppliers.

A platform that collects money has to move it to the people delivering the trip. That can involve different currencies, different banking rails, and different levels of reliability. It also raises operational questions like:

When does the operator get paid—at booking, at check-in, after completion?
How are refunds handled when plans change?
How does the platform protect itself against fraud while still being fair to customers?

The BBC video doesn’t go into these mechanics for TripZapp specifically, but they’re the standard hidden work behind any travel marketplace that wants to scale.

What “tech in Africa” often really means: making global tools fit local realities

The BBC frames TripZapp as part of a series on technology in Africa. In practice, many of the most valuable “tech” moves are not about inventing something entirely new. They’re about adapting proven tools—payments, productivity software, booking workflows—so they work in places where infrastructure and norms differ.

That can mean accommodating:

travellers booking from abroad while experiences are delivered locally
varying levels of connectivity
operators who are small businesses, not tech companies

Good platforms make these complexities feel boring. Boring is the point.

Where travel tech can break: trust, safety, and expectations

Travel is unusually sensitive to trust because the “product” is delivered far from the buyer’s home.

Any platform connecting tourists to local operators must deal with a few predictable failure points:

Expectation gaps: photos and descriptions can oversell; local realities can undershoot.
Safety and liability: travellers may assume there is a strong safety net; operators may have very different norms.
Dispute handling: when something goes wrong, the platform becomes a judge.

The BBC video doesn’t claim TripZapp has solved these permanently—it simply shows the direction of travel: using modern tools to reduce friction and broaden access.

Bottom line

TripZapp’s pitch is simple—find, book, and pay for African travel—but the strategy underneath it is harder and more interesting: connect tourists to locally owned businesses by making payments and coordination feel routine. If the company can keep the operational layer strong as it grows, it’s the kind of “boring infrastructure” travel tech that can genuinely expand what’s bookable, not just what’s visible.

Sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cvgkerq52p4o?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss