Every year, international travellers spend billions of dollars on African safaris, luxury lodges and holiday experiences. Yet before much of that money reaches the businesses providing those experiences, a portion 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 surprisingly expensive.
TurnStay, a South African fintech that helps travel businesses accept payments from international guests, believes that problem has been overlooked for too long.
Alon Stern, TurnStay’s chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder, said the three-year-old startup processed over R1 billion ($60.6 million) in travel payments during the first six months of 2026. The company provides payment infrastructure for hotels, safari lodges, tour operators and villa agencies, helping them reduce the cost of accepting international bookings.
The milestone underscores a broader challenge facing 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 simply to receive payment. Card network fees, foreign exchange spreads, cross-border acquiring costs, and can collectively consume a meaningful share of booking revenue, eroding margins and reducing the amount of tourism income that ultimately remains on the continent.
“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,” said Stern.
He stated that 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%.
“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.
“Global platforms have used this model for years,” stated Stern. “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, with operations expanding beyond South Africa into Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana and Mauritius.
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.
For Stern, the company’s rapid growth is less about payment volumes 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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