Imagine two hotels sitting side by side. Same location. Similar rooms. Similar quality of service. Hotel A charges KES 4,500 per night, every night, every month, all year. Easy to remember. Simple to communicate. Completely flat. Hotel B charges KES 3,200 per night in February and KES 6,800 per night in December. It discounts on […]
There is a guest who stays at a small guesthouse in Karen every time he visits Nairobi for work. He travels from Mombasa four or five times a year. He always asks for the same room — the quiet one on the first floor, away from the road. He takes his tea without sugar. He […]
Right now, while you are reading this, thousands of travellers are searching for a place to stay in your city. They are on Booking.com, comparing properties by price and rating. They are on Airbnb, filtering by location and room type. They are on Expedia, looking for something near a conference venue. They are on Google, […]
Growing a guesthouse is genuinely hard work. You found a property. You furnished it. You figured out pricing. You built a reputation, one guest at a time, through good service and word of mouth. And at some point in that journey, you put together a system for managing your bookings — a notebook, a spreadsheet, […]
Walk into almost any hotel lobby in Kenya, Uganda, or Tanzania and ask a guest how they want to pay. Most of the time, the answer is M-Pesa. Mobile money is not a trend in East Africa. It is infrastructure — as fundamental to daily financial life as a bank account is in Europe or […]
It usually starts innocently enough. A guest sends a message: “Hi, do you have a room available for Friday night?” You check your notebook, confirm it’s free, reply yes, and ask for their name. They send it. You write it down. The booking is done. It worked. So you kept doing it. Then came the group chats. […]