Online hotel booking platform Yamsafer (“the traveller” in Arabic) is based in Ramallah, Palestine, making it not only the first booking site to cater completely to the Arabian travel market, but the first Palestinian one to boot.
Hotelier Middle East spoke to Yamsafer CEO and co-founder Faris Zaher about what Arabian hotel guests want, how to market Makkah and perfecting the call centre model.
According to the World Travel Organization, the MENA travel market is the world’s second fastest growing travel market, grossing US $49 billion in 2014.
Yet with how aggressively GCC and North African residents travel, there are surprisingly few big players in the online booking or online travel agent market who are based here – Booking.com and Expedia are still the most-used booking platforms for the region.
But wouldn’t it be better for travellers if they had a platform that was purpose-built for their market?
“Yamsafer is uniquely positioned to capture the GCC market - which is transitioning from offline to online bookings and is increasingly mobilefirst,” said Zaher.
Saide Nashef, founding partner at Sadara Ventures, a venture capitalist organisation, agrees, saying: “Companies that will emerge as leaders in this space will have to create deep valueadding relations with suppliers, develop hypertargeting based on a unique set of travel needs and habits of the regional traveller, and build proprietary technology that can deliver tailored execution at scale.”
Founded in late 2011 by Faris and two other co-founders, CTO Sameh Alfar (and another co-founder who isn’t active with the company), the goal of Yamsafer was to get Arabs travelling in the style they prefer.
And their hard work has paid off – the Palestinian start-up is either the number one or number two provider of room nights for the hotels listed on Yamsafer.com.
Zaher said that Yamsafer is similar to other booking sites in terms of layout and operation, so it will be easy to use for most web users.
However, the site offers a few unique features that regional travellers will particularly appreciate, such as card-less bookings, which are of particular interest to the Arabian market, as the credit card penetration isn’t as high here as in other parts of the world.
It’s up to each property whether they accept this feature, though Zaher says that the site has a less than 10% no-show rate for card-less bookings, so it’s a feature that hotels often want to take advantage of.
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When it comes to inventory, Yamsafer has done a lot of R&D into which locations and which properties make GCC nationals tick – and the company goes after those properties determinedly to ensure they sign up to the site and offer Arabian travellers the hotels they want.
“When we enter a destination, we are aggressive in our research to see what attracts people to that destination,” Zaher said. “We make sure we get properties on board that travellers want, which benefits both Yamsafer and the hotel.
“Every destination has its successful property profile,” he continues. “For example, in Eastern Province in Saudi Arabia, there are chalet-style properties where large families can have three or four bedrooms, private swimming pools, etc. So we have more of those properties as that’s what travellers want when they go there.
“Another example is Makkah, where the demand dynamics are different – there, Yamsafer has targeted properties that are close to the Haram or religious sites, particularly those within walking distance. Then we’ve gone for properties that have partial views of the religious sites.”
The budding booking site is available on the web and as an app, which is standard for brand.com sites and OTAs. But Yamsafer goes a step further, with an app function that allows guests to book a hotel by calling through the app for free via voice-over IP.
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