The new Palestinian booking site for Arab guests
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.
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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As soon as the guests call, Yamsafer gets all their details through the app, so there’s no need for the guest to give them all that information, as they would have to do with a traditional booking – which increases the speed of the booking and the customer experience.
“This is really helpful for customers who want a bricks and mortar experience or to make a booking immediately without spending so much time online,” comments Zaher.
As part of its focus on the regional traveller, Yamsafer operates a 24-hour, minimal fuss call centre, as, Zaher notes, “GCC travellers in particular and Arab travellers in general don’t tend to keep 9-5 hours – they want to pick up the phone at midnight or 1am and make their booking as soon as they decide to travel”.
When devising the call centre and its goals, Zaher and partners focused on creating an easy experience for callers, using their own experiences with OTAs as a template for what not to do.
“How frustrating and time-consuming is it to call a booking site’s customer service line?” he asks, laughing.
A few other features that are bound to appeal to GCC nationals are the in-built Yamsafer maps over the Google map of each property. The maps show things that are of interest to regional travellers, such as distance to religious sites and F&B offerings.
Not only that, but Yamsafer maps show navigation in a way that Arab guests actually navigate. “Street names are useless to a lot of Arabs,” Zaher explains. “They don’t navigate by going right on 3rd Street – they notice landmarks or they name intersections after buildings that are long gone. We incorporate that mind set into our maps.”
One thing that hoteliers will love about Yamsafer is the amount of focus that goes into each property’s USPs.
“When we sign a new hotel”, explains Zaher, “We notice customers who have booked similar hotels in the past. Then we target those customers to advertise the hotel to get the hotel immediate exposure.
“Even if people aren’t booking straight away, it’s creating brand awareness for the property and raising their profile amongst travellers.
“A European coming to Dubai might be going on a once-in-a-lifetime trip and you’ll never see her again. But a Saudi going from Jeddah to Riyadh will be going there three to four times a year, so it’s worth so much to your hotel to market directly to that guy for a new property.
“Hoteliers like working with Yamsafer is because of the average transaction amount– we do a lot of upselling for the hotel.”
For now, Yamsafer’s customer base is mostly Saudi Arabian properties, with most of the guests booking through them also hailing from KSA.
Zaher said the company’s goals are to move into new markets, with aggressive expansion plans as well as developing supplier relationships in target markets – and he has his sights set firmly on the UAE.
With Yamsafer just having secured a new round of financing, its expansion plans seem a certainty.