Millions of international tourists travel to Africa for safaris, luxury lodges and once-in-a-lifetime holiday experiences. But before much of the money they spend reaches the businesses delivering those experiences, a sizeable portion is lost to payment processing fees, foreign exchange costs and the complexities of moving money across borders.
For many African tourism operators, attracting customers is only half the battle. Getting paid can be just as challenging and expensive.
That is the problem TurnStay, a South African fintech startup, is trying to solve.
The three-year-old company provides payment infrastructure that enables hotels, safari lodges, tour operators and villa agencies to accept international payments more efficiently, helping them reduce the cost of processing bookings from overseas travellers.
According to co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Alon Stern, TurnStay processed more than R1 billion ($60.6 million) in travel payments during the first six months of 2026, marking a significant milestone for a startup focused on one of the tourism industry’s less visible pain points.
The achievement also highlights a broader issue across Africa’s tourism sector.
While African hotels and tour operators compete for the same international visitors as businesses in Europe, North America and Asia, they often pay considerably more to receive those payments. Card network fees, foreign exchange spreads and cross-border acquiring costs can eat into booking revenue, reducing profit margins and limiting the amount of tourism income that ultimately stays within African economies.
“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 estimates that traditional payment systems can consume as much as 8% of the value of an international travel booking.
TurnStay believes there is a more efficient alternative.
The company combines a merchant-of-record model with modern payment infrastructure including stablecoin-powered settlement for cross-border transactions to reduce payment processing costs to as little as 1.6%, according to Stern.
“The less merchants pay in fees, the more money stays in Africa,” he said. “That’s the philosophy behind everything we build. African travel businesses already deliver world-class experiences. We believe the payment infrastructure supporting them should be just as competitive.”
Rather than relying entirely on conventional banking networks, TurnStay uses modern payment rails to move funds across borders more quickly and at lower cost before settling payments with merchants.
Stern says the approach mirrors infrastructure long used by global travel platforms.
“Large international platforms have benefited from this model for years,” he said. “What we’ve done is make that same infrastructure available to African travel businesses, so a safari lodge or tour operator doesn’t have to operate at the scale of Airbnb to benefit from it.”
The startup’s customer base now includes some of Africa’s best-known hospitality brands, including Singita, Londolozi, Safari.com and The Capital. It has also expanded beyond South Africa into Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana and Mauritius as demand for more efficient cross-border payment solutions grows.
TurnStay’s growth has attracted investor backing.
The company raised $300,000 in pre-seed funding in 2024 before securing a $2 million seed round the following year. It is now preparing to raise a Series A round to support its next phase of expansion across the continent.
For Stern, however, the company’s progress is about more than processing larger payment volumes.
He sees it as an opportunity to address a long-standing structural challenge in African tourism, where businesses often lose a significant share of their revenue before it reaches their accounts.
“Three years ago there were just two of us and an idea,” he said. “Today we’re processing more than a billion rand every six months for some of Africa’s best-known travel brands, and we’re only getting started.”
As international tourism continues to recover and cross-border travel gathers momentum, companies like TurnStay are betting that improving how businesses get paid could become just as important as attracting the travellers themselves.