Every year, international travellers spend billions of dollars on African safaris, luxury lodges and holiday experiences. Tourism is one of the largest contributors to GDP and employment across many African economies, from South Africa to Kenya and Tanzania. Yet before much of that money reaches the businesses providing those experiences, part of it is lost to payment processing fees, foreign exchange charges and the cost of moving money across borders.

For African tourism operators, getting paid can be unexpectedly expensive.

TurnStay, a South African fintech that helps travel businesses accept payments from international guests, says that problem has been overlooked for too long.

Alon Stern, TurnStay’s chief executive officer and co-founder, said the three-year-old startup processed more than R1 billion ($60.6 million) in travel payments in the first six months of 2026. The company provides payment infrastructure for hotels, safari lodges, tour operators and villa agencies, helping them lower the cost of accepting international bookings.

The milestone highlights a broader challenge in Africa's tourism sector. While many operators compete for the same global travellers as hotels and tour companies elsewhere in the world, they often pay significantly more just to receive payment. Card network fees, foreign exchange spreads and cross-border acquiring costs can collectively consume a meaningful share of booking revenue, eroding margins and reducing the amount of tourism income that remains on the continent. The cost gap is particularly acute for smaller and mid-sized operators that lack the negotiating leverage of global hotel chains or large online travel agencies, leaving them to absorb fees that counterparts in Europe, North America or parts of Asia typically do not face at the same magnitude.

"Getting paid can be expensive in the travel industry, and for a long time African merchants have carried a much heavier cost than their overseas counterparts for doing exactly the same job," Stern said.

He said traditional payment processing for international travel bookings can cost African merchants as much as 8% of a transaction. By combining a merchant-of-record model with modern payment rails, including stablecoins for cross-border settlement, TurnStay says it can reduce fees to as little as 1.6%. Stablecoin-based settlement has gained traction across Africa's fintech landscape as a way to bypass slow and costly correspondent banking channels, which have historically added days of delay and additional fees to international transfers in and out of the continent.

"The less merchants pay in fees, the more money stays in Africa," Stern said. "That's the philosophy behind everything we build. The experiences African travel businesses offer are already world-class. We think the payment infrastructure behind them should be too."

Rather than relying solely on traditional banking infrastructure, TurnStay uses digital payment rails to move money across borders faster and at lower cost before settling funds with merchants. The approach mirrors a broader wave of African fintech innovation — companies such as Flutterwave, Paystack and Yellow Card have built multibillion-dollar businesses by addressing gaps in the continent's payment and financial infrastructure, though TurnStay is among the few focused specifically on the travel vertical.

"Global platforms have used this model for years," Stern said. "But what we have done is bring that same infrastructure to African travel merchants directly, so a lodge or tour operator doesn't have to be the size of Airbnb to access it."

The company counts luxury hospitality brands including Singita, Londolozi, Safari.com and The Capital among its customers, and its operations have expanded beyond South Africa into Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana and Mauritius — markets where tourism accounts for a significant and growing share of national revenue.

TurnStay raised a $300,000 pre-seed round in 2024, followed by a $2 million seed round in 2025, and is now preparing for a Series A fundraising round to accelerate its pan-African expansion. The company's funding trajectory reflects continued investor appetite for African fintech startups tackling vertical-specific payment problems, even as broader venture funding across the continent has become more selective.

For Stern, the company's rapid growth is less about payment volume than correcting a structural imbalance in Africa's tourism economy.

"Three years ago there were two of us and an idea," he said. "Now we're processing over a billion rand every six months for some of the best-known names in African travel, and we have just begun."

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