Business
Obinna Ekezie – former NBA star, now founder and CEO of travel portal Wakanow.com
Obinna Ekezie is the founder of Wakanow.com, one of the fastest growing and largest internet travel sites in Africa; Ekezie was also listed as an Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist at the 2015 All Africa Business Leaders Awards.
Ekezie left his professional basketball career with the NBA after noticing the growing opportunities in Africa – and while struggling to book a ticket back home to Nigeria – he saw the need to bring the same kind of ease he was used to home from the West.
“I saw the opportunity to build and online travel company in Nigeria and I thought it was going to be huge because I knew that Nigerians traveled a lot, there was no transparency in the travel industry,” he said.
Ekezie felt the process was “archaic”, he could not get enough information regarding the price options and he could not pay online but at the bank or the airline’s office. He figured bringing such ease home would be a lucrative space to go into and decided to retire from basketball.
He owes a lot of his initial success to CNBC Africa. After the channel featured his company he was contacted by his first investor.
According to Ekezie, Wakanow.com has grown to become the largest travel portal in Nigeria in terms of the bookings – services include flights; hotel booking and travel insurance.
Wakanow.com wasn’t his first attempt at entrepreneurship; his first try at the online travel business was unsuccessful. Ekezie believes that business failed mostly because he had the wrong partner, and that is the difference in this business’s success.
He added: “We have very strong people that are doing a very good job in making sure that our core values when it comes to customer services is going to improve every day.”
Wakanow.com keeps innovating and has plans to expand further into Africa and internationally.
“We are expanding across Africa, we plan to be in about 22 African countries in the next 3 years, we are expanding globally to other key markets, the United Kingdom; the United States; the Middle East – Dubai, UAE so there is a lot of work that has been done, so we need people that are dedicated and are ready to do that,” said Ekezie.
The online bookings company is focused on domestic an outbound travel and is now looking to do inbound travel. “We are working very hard to build a platform that is going to enable travelers to come into African destinations not just foreigners – we are looking to expose Africa to Africans because there is a lot of work that needs to be done in exposing the interest in African destinations and their tourism assets.”
The booking company is also working on a travel show called Destination Africa that will be shot in about 22 African countries, reflecting each country’s tourism destinations so people can visualize what they could experience in these places. As part of their expansion, they have also included bus companies onto the platform.
“We were very excited about that because over 70 million Nigerians travel by bus, whether its interstate or regional and we think there is a huge opportunity there to be able to emigrate all these 3 services, ticketing, charter services and cargo services – consolidated on an online platform.”
It was important to Ekezie to represent the continent by naming the company something African,
“Waka means move or travel and we want to move now.”
Source: CNBC Africa