Safari Wallet: Redefining travel experiences for Tanzanians

A visionary co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Safari Wallet, Iddy John has made it his mission to reshape the tourism landscape in Tanzania through innovative technology.
Born in 2014, Safari Wallet is a travel fintech that identifies, curates experiences and destinations and allows travellers to book and plan their holidays then pay for them in instalments.
This system has created flexible payment options which has enabled people who have often associated travel and tourism with huge expenses to explore their country's rich cultural and natural heritages.
Like every other common African childhood story, Iddy says that growing up, travel and a visit to national parks or museums was always the promised reward for academic excellence.
While the exposure to travel tourism instilled in him a fascination for what the world offered, the older he got, the more he saw how many people took tourism and travel as leisurely luxury.
This understanding led to Iddy embarking on a journey to redefine how Tanzanians experienced travel.
“Growing up, my mother had a job that saw us cross between Loliondo and Ngorongoro frequently and so we were exposed to local destinations early on,” Iddy shares. 
The things we remember and learn as children, shape who we are in adulthood and while Iddy never actually pursued studies in tourism, the experiences he encountered in his childhood played a crucial role in his adulthood ventures.
“Around 2012/2013, I was on a personal journey of trying to figure out what it was I wanted. I had a lot of ideas butI really wanted to start a tourism company,” he says of his journey.
This was already a heavily saturated market and Iddy shares that he wasn’t interested in beating that competition. He wanted to build something that was uniquely geared towards his particular skill sets.
“After extensive research, I learnt that although the many tourism companies that existed were successful in getting customers, they lacked market power,” he shares.
Many of these companies in their research relied heavily on agents sourcing clients for them or attendance of events like the World Travel Market (WTM), Africa’s Travel Indaba (ATI), etc., with the hope of finding agents who will market their companies for them and then direct interested clients to them.
“This meant that while they had customers, 80 percent of the market share of a tourism company that runs in Tanzania has never acquired it on their own,” he explains.
This was also influenced by the fact that many of these companies also did not have a strong digital footprint and did not know how to use SEOs.
There also existed the challenge of failing to retain the customers they were given.
“I then started Kwetu Africa, a digital travel marketing agency, specifically for tourism, with the goal of providing support to tourism companies operating in Tanzania,” Iddy explains.
During their marketing activities for those companies, Iddy and his team discovered that local residents constantly did inquiries through them, with the assumption that Kwetu Africa was a tour operator.
“Tour operators often work with packages and when these individuals contacted other operators and were given the prices for these packages, they found them to be quite expensive as they were curated with international tourists in mind,” he shares, adding that even with an incentive such as 15 percent discount, some were still not able to meet the price. 
“Our task then became us having to go back to a tour operator, make the case for these potential clients and work out a package that they can afford.”
Kwetu Africa essentially laid the foundation for Safari Wallet's innovative approach to travel because through its operations, the team learnt just how much Tanzanians wanted to travel and that many faced pricing and packaging challenges.
“We saw that the main challenge was financial, which we proved after conducting further surveys. So, in 2014, Safari Wallet started as an idea, and then we decided to capture domains and register names first,” explains Iddy.
He further emphasised that this challenge stems from the absence of a culture of saving in advance for specific travel goals.
“We're the type of people who, if given 50 million suddenly, want to do everything at once—marriage, travel, building—every need comes at once. Planning in advance is something that costs us. If you look at the cultures of others abroad, they already have plans towards something. For instance, they might plan to visit Serengeti or Ngorongoro two years from now. They start researching how much it will cost and begin setting aside funds to fulfil that dream,” he explains.
“Our research also found another issue that while locals may pay for these experiences, they do not receive the treatment that foreign tourists do,” shares Iddy.
The customer segmentation meant that local tourists had to deal with below par service from operators.
To ensure Safari Wallet brings a revolution and change for locals, it prioritised three main areas: financial empowerment, technological advancement, and enhancing the overall travel experience.
“As a start-up, the main purpose was to come and change the culture by allowing people to adopt slowly, plan ahead and enable individuals to pay gradually, ensuring that at the end of the day, they know that their funds were used effectively,” he says. 
“This way, people don't feel like they've sacrificed too much, and they don't experience the pain of thinking they've, perhaps, recklessly spent five million instead.”
Through features like ‘Design Your Own Experience,’ users can create bespoke itineraries, akin to selecting from a buffet of travel options.
“We are working on enhancing the ‘Design Your Own Experience' feature so that users who visit our platform can create their customised travel experiences, similar to a safari buffet. This will enable us to offer a vast array of experiences and seamlessly connect with other sub-parties through technology,” he shared.
As they transitioned into formal operation as Safari Wallet in 2016 and 2017, they faced a notable challenge from existing service-provider ignorance since for them, local tourists weren't their primary target market.
Iddy shares that the service providers neglected to promote tourism locally, prioritising the international market instead.
“During the Covid-19 period, Europe itself declared a loss of 36 million pounds from local tourism, indicating that Europeans travel more within their countries than they do abroad. Currently, there are at least 42 million middle-class Africans who can afford to travel within Africa. We see Kenyans driving to Tanzania because they have already established a culture through initiatives like Tembea Kenya during times of crisis,” he explains.
Iddy also noted that despite the prevailing ignorance among service providers, some companies opted to cater to locals during the low season when foreign visitors were absent.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a blessing in disguise for Safari Wallet as it was a time domestic tourism peaked, which was social proof that underscored the necessity for localisation of tourism packages and experiences.
“I remember during the pandemic, around 2021, I received a call from the UN who wanted to discuss how we could promote tourism in Africa. They were interested in using the Safari Wallet concept as proof that it works. So we engaged in lengthy dialogues from April to November. It was during this time that we began to see companies start to promote local tourism,” he shares.
Despite the eagerness of numerous companies to participate in such endeavours, many struggled due to the fact that they had an insufficient grasp of the local market dynamics.
Building a tech tourism company during the height of the pandemic was not without its challenges. Iddy had to deal with building solo for a time and took advantage of hackathons online.
“At the time, my morale and motivation began to wane because it was failure upon failure, and the challenges just kept piling on and on more occasions than one, I kept thinking that I was done,” he says.
Iddy applied for different hackathons at the time and they proved effective in helping him understand how best to position his product as well as build an effective tool.
“The key is to create experiences that draw people in, for example organising events and developing products that align with those experiences,” he shares.
In building a thriving tech ecosystem, Iddy emphasises the importance of documented failures that innovators can look for as a blueprint to learn from.
“Looking back, a lot of the failures and frustrations were unavoidable because of the limited number of failures we could learn from,” he explains.
He further explains that there is also a need for more market ready products where innovation is concerned over the vast array of investment ready programs in the tech space. Innovators need to be positioned with market ready products and given sandboxes to test their products.
“Technology is also a major job provider, if leveraged right, in any industry and tourism needs to begin to fully capitalise on this,” he says.
However, to do so successfully, he also believes that the ecosystem requires unity, support and where necessary, policies that give leeway to developing such as tax holidays for startups.
Despite challenges within Tanzania's start-up ecosystem, Iddy  remains steadfast in his vision for Safari Wallet. 
He believes that perseverance, innovation, and community support are essential in overcoming obstacles and driving progress for tech tourism.