Why We Invested in TurnStay: Streamlining Travel Sector Payments Across Africa

The African tourism and hospitality sector is a high-growth market, yet businesses are losing significant revenue - up to 12% of turnover - due to payment system inefficiencies. This leakage comes from a combination of high card processing fees, crippling FX losses, hefty Online Travel Agent (OTA)commissions, and alarmingly high rates of failed transactions.

Currently, international Payment Service Providers (PSPs) offer limited, inadequate support, and cross-border card payments to African entities are frequently blocked or delayed. This severely reduces conversion rates and strains already thin margins.

African hotels and tour operators typically pay 3–5% in card fees and an additional 2–4% in FX and banking charges, especially when dealing with currencies like ZAR.

Settlements can take up to five days, severely impacting cash flows.

In markets with strict currency controls, repatriating funds is both complex and expensive.

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Furthermore, the reliance on global OTAs like Booking.com and Airbnb, which charge 20–30%in commissions, strips control from local businesses. Since most African travel operators cannot act as the merchant of record, they lack control over cash flows, payment terms, and crucial pricing strategy. Even direct booking conversions suffer, impacted by as much as 25–50% due to failed payments and checkout friction for foreign guests.

TurnStay’s Solution: The Merchant of Record Model

TurnStay is a travel paymentsplatform designed to surgically address these pain points through a powerful Merchantof Record (MoR) model.

TurnStay processes payments in the traveler’s home country and efficiently remits fundslocally using stablecoins. This process fundamentally cuts fees, drastically reduces payment failure rates, and significantly accelerates settlement times.

The platform integrates seamlessly with major booking engines and PropertyManagement System (PMS) providers, enabling fast and easy onboarding for hotels, tour operators, and travel agents. TurnStay's monetization is based on merchant fees, FX markups, and stablecoin arbitrage, resulting in a model thatis both scalable and capital-light.

Theaddressable market for cross-border travel payments and OTA fees is huge,representing $94 billion globally, including $29 billion in emergingmarkets. In Africa, TurnStay targets a $1.27 billion travel paymentsmarket and a $1.7 billion opportunity in OTA commissions, with SouthAfrica alone representing a $590 million opportunity.

WhyWe Invested

1. Exceptional Team

TurnStay is led by co-founders with the perfect blend of deep fintech expertise and on-the-ground travel tech experience.

Alon Stern (CEO): A co-founder of Slide Financial, with previous experience as Head of Data at Prodigy Finance, and a strong academic background with a PhD in Mathematics from NYU and Postdoc at Princeton.

James Hedley (COO):Co-founder of Quicket (acquired by Ticketmaster) with over 15 years in the African travel, payments, and commerce landscape.

2. Product-Market Fit

TurnStay delivers undeniable and measurable value to its customers: cutting transaction costs, improving reliability, and integrating directly into existing workflows.The platform is solving a universal problem for African travel businesses bygiving them back control and predictability over their core revenue streams.

3. Long-Term Competitiveness

TurnStay’s sector-specific approach positions it to become the foundational payments layer for Africa’s entire travel industry. By integrating directly with hotel PMS platforms, booking engines, and channel managers, the product becomes deeply embedded in customer workflows. This strategic lock-in creates strong defensibility against generic PSPs. The future product roadmap, which includes services like automated payouts and dynamic pricing tools, will further enhance retention and build lasting infrastructure in Africa's growing tourism sector and other emerging markets.