NYVÉ Travel

East African travel is sold through a long tail of small, local operators. Many of them run excellent trips but have little international visibility, while travellers planning a first safari face a wall of unverifiable websites, inconsistent quotes and unclear payment expectations.

The result is a market with real supply and real demand, separated mostly by trust and comparability.

Real supply. Real demand. Separated by trust.

A traveller comparing operators has no reliable way to tell a credible agency from an unverified one, no way to compare offers on the same terms, and no clarity on when and how money should change hands.

For the operator, the problem is inverted: strong local expertise, but no channel to reach travellers who are already looking.

Product strategy, business development, partnerships and marketplace design. I defined the two-sided marketplace model and the traveller, proposal-comparison and operator journeys, developed the partner value proposition and the initial go-to-market approach, and set the standards partners are held to.

Alongside the product work I ran the commercial side myself: partner sourcing and outreach, proposition conversations, review of submitted documentation and suitability, and the decision on who was onboarded.

Rather than building a booking engine first, the model starts with the moment of decision: a traveller submits a trip request, and receives three tailored proposals from vetted local agencies within 48 hours, free and without obligation.

Discovery is structured the way travellers actually think, by destination and by park, with operator profiles and live packages showing the agency's own per-person pricing rather than placeholder numbers.

1. 01Trip request submitted
2. 02Vetted operators matched
3. 03Three tailored proposals within 48 hours
4. 04Side-by-side comparison
5. 05Clear payment guidance before booking
6. 06Concierge support through the trip

A live two-sided marketplace across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Zanzibar, organised around four promises: personally vetted operators, tailored proposals to compare side by side, clear payment guidance before any booking, and concierge support from planning to homecoming.

The commercial decision that shapes everything else is that trust, not inventory, is the scarce good. Verification is therefore a product feature rather than a policy page, and comparability is enforced by the proposal format instead of being left to the traveller.

1. AlternativesBuild a booking engine and list as many operators as possible, or open the marketplace to self-listing and let travellers filter.
2. What the evidence pointed toTravellers could already find operators; what they could not do was tell a credible agency from an unverified one, or compare quotes on the same terms.
3. DecisionVet before publishing, and cap each request at three tailored proposals, enough to compare and few enough to decide.

Trust, not inventory, is the scarce good.

A marketplace with no supply is a landing page, so the first real commercial task was building the operator side by hand. I identified prospective partners across the region, approached them directly and explained the NYVÉ proposition: what the platform does, what it asks of a partner and what it returns.

Built NYVÉ's initial supply side through direct outreach to around 100 prospective East African operators and guides, screening submissions and reviewing partner documentation before onboarding. The process converted into 19 partner profiles through the onboarding flow, with 12 currently published on the marketplace.

Onboarding was deliberately selective rather than open: not every prospect was approached to completion, and not every submission was published.

1. 01~100 prospective operators and guides approached
2. 02Proposition communicated directly to each partner
3. 03Documentation and suitability reviewed
4. 0419 partner profiles onboarded: 11 agencies/operators, 8 guides
5. 0512 published on the marketplace: 7 agencies, 5 guides

The supply side was built by conversation, not by advertising.