Portfolio

Fika Rooms was a distributed hotel concept focused on providing standardized, quality, and budget accommodation in Africa’s secondary cities. The validation period demonstrated that the Fika Rooms business as conceived (a distributed hotel model) is not feasible for the following reasons: A) Insufficient supply of ready or near-ready units to scale at a viable rate; B) Non-professional landlords across each new unit would mean a massive administrative process and potential legal exposure; C) Poor recent investment performance of peer companies (OYO, Sonder) will make funding this business much harder than originally planned.

A few months into the Covid-19 pandemic it was clear that a number of Safari camps and hotels were hurting badly. We explored the idea of starting a debt fund to support them until the crisis passed. We spoke to over 50 accomodation providers. Contrary to our instincts, most were not interested. Those that expressed interest were only able to accept non-commerical rates. Our conclusion was that, luckily, most accommodation providers here aren’t levered up and are able to go dormant with minimal running costs.

Anthill Services was founded during the Covid-19 crisis with the belief that without many guests, tourism operators would turn to professionalizing the areas of their business they aren’t particularly efficient at - including back-end operations, direct bookings and digital marketing.  After reaching out to over 50 potential clients, we concluded that now simply isn’t the right time for Anthill - while there are few guests there is less money. We hope to explore reviving Anthill when the timing is right.

PEV looked seriously at the acquisition of an online travel agency specializing in African travel. While there were many attractive elements to the business, ultimately PEV concluded that competing in top-of-the-funnel customer acquisition required more specialization than the acquisition target’s brand allowed.

With the explosion of demand for remote working, Wavel attempted to boost occupancy rates for African holiday homes by kitting out vacation properties for remote work and then listing them on our own remote-work specialized booking site. In the end, the model proved difficult for a number reasons, but chief among them was the complexity of a business model that required both management and bookings of properties.