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Tanzania’s First Flight Booking Site Carves New Path for Airline Industry

Tanzania’s First Flight Booking Site Carves New Path for Airline Industry

Tanzanians fly the way Europeans travel by train. It’s the main mode of city-hopping transportation. But there have really only been two ways to book a domestic flight between the country’s dozens of airports: through the airline directly or through a travel broker — for a fee.

That changed last week when a pair of digital entrepreneurs launched the country’s first booking website, Flyezee.com. The founders say they want to bring more convenience and regularity to East Africa’s emerging commercial aviation industry, offering flight comparisons and no-fee booking for the country’s  travelers.

“There’s been no common marketplace so far for the airlines to represent themselves,” says Bruce Hurd, who lives in London. He started the company in September 2013 with his buddy Matthew Bell, who had been living in Tanzania for 10 years, learning Swahili and launching other tech startups. He’s now in Germany.

Flyezee went live June 18 on the wings (sorry) of their personal $180,000 investment.

The Tanzanian aviation industry is “fragmented,” Hurd says. “We’re coming in as the first online marketplace.”

Websites like Hotwire and Kayak, so central to air travel in other parts of the world, don’t work well in Tanzania. That’s mainly because flight schedules are so erratic. Sometimes a scheduled route flies; sometimes it doesn’t for lack of demand. Plus, connecting flights are difficult to work out because the airlines don’t communicate well.

Major airlines link their databases to a global distribution system — a central network from which Hotwire and Kayak pull their info. But Africa isn’t there yet. Hurd and Bell aren’t aware of any competition to Flyezee anywhere in East Africa, despite two big players operating in the region, Kenya Airways and Ethiopian Airlines.

Africa Taking Off

Analysts and investors widely expect commercial air travel in Africa to increase as more people enter the middle class. The little data that exists on flight traffic, however, suggests sluggish growth so far.

Last May, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said passenger air traffic had increased 7.3 percent over the previous 12 months. But then in its most recent report, for April 2014, the IATA said passenger traffic had actually shrunk 3.5 percent for the month of March.

International travel to and from African countries is the weakest growing in the world. That “could be in part reflecting adverse economic developments in some parts of the continent, with the slowdown of the major economy of South Africa,” IATA analysts reported.

The Problem with Safety 

Another reason could be safety concerns. Last week, Kenya Airways reported second-half losses of $43 million, which the company blamed partly on terrorist attacks at an international airport and a shopping mall in Nairobi.

Safety concerns in Africa aren’t entirely the making of Islamic militants, though. Africa has the least safe airlines in the world, according to statistics compiled by the Aviation Safety Network. The continent accounts for 3 percent of departures and 20 percent of fatalities, the organization said.

“Generally there is poor safety oversight, so authorities are not able to detect and change safety lapses within the aviation industry,” Harro Ranter, president of the Aviation Safety Network, told AFKInsider.

But none of this has tempered expectations.

For one, air safety is getting better. The European Union “tries to help countries that are banned from flying into the E.U.,” Ranter says. And the International Civil Aviation Organisation “performs audits to show exactly where the weaknesses are and what needs to be done.”

Moreover, there’s nowhere for the industry to go but up (so many bad puns).