Travel industry business services provider Travelport has opened an office in Kenya to serve both the East African country and 16 others in Africa.
According to Travelport the reason for opening the Kenyan office was to tap into the tourism sector in the country, which has been growing at a year-on-year rate of eight per cent and estimated to grow by 25 per cent by 2015.
The company, one of the world’s largest travel content aggregators and provider of transaction processing solutions, says it hopes to be the provider of choice for travel industry agents as it deals seeks to deal with customers directly.
“With the current high air traffic growth, high internet penetration, increased smartphone usage in the continent we feel the time is right to have a presence here,” Travelport managing director Mark Meehan said during the opening of the new office.
The company says a local presence will also enable the company to deploy its products directly to the market.
Travelport says it will be banking on recently released products such as the Travelport Smartpoint App, which makes the booking process easier for agents by building on the Galileo platform.
Country general manager Rajab Itambo said he will concentrate on service delivery.
“We will embark on empowering the selling experience by selling high value content, develop a developers’ network and run an open platform that will allow agents easy access to content,” he said.
Apart from Smartpoint, the company also banking offers its universal API, universal desktop and sponsored flights products.
The company operates in around 170 countries and owns approximately 48 per cent of online travel company Orbitz.
