It’s not everyday that a green, white and green head-tie wearing bureaucrat visits a startup. Pictured above is the the Director General of the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation, Mrs. Sally Mbanefo signing over the keys of the kingdom to Marek Zmyslowski, CEO of Jovago, endorsing the online hotel booking platform as an official partner.
The advantages are mutual. Jovago gets to brandish its NTDC cool points. The NTDC gets to provide relevant hotel stay content to the random tourist who happens to find themselves on Nigeria’s tourism website. The content being a link to Jovago’s website.
In an official statement, the Director General said “We are very keen on this new partnership with Jovago.com. Not only is it targeted at promoting Nigeria’s thriving tourism sector and exhibiting the country’s potentials to Nigerians and the world at large, it also makes it easy for anyone visiting the official NTDC website to choose from the wide selection of hotels available on Jovago.com.”
NTDC might vaguely rhyme with NSCDC, but their official website is at www.tourism.gov.ng. That’s all.
I know you are wondering how you would happen to land on a government website in the first place. You would be surprised at how many first-time travellers to Nigeria do, via exploratory Google searches. The NTDC maintains a list of “NTDC registered” hotels on a state by state basis for these people. Almost 70 percent of its traffic is foreign, and 80 percent of its visitors arrive via search. There is a free app idea in there somewhere.
If you did happen to wind up on the NTDC’s site, you would find that compared to it’s face-palm inducing contemporaries, it is actually one of the better designed Nigerian government websites out there, mobile and everything. Green-white-green head ties for the win, clearly.
