Two things have shaped my values. Growing up in a coal mining village, Easington Colliery in the north east of England and witnessing the Miners Strike in my mid teens helped forge an acute sense of injustice. My parents always told me I’d never work “down the pit”, Margaret Thatcher made sure that would never happen. For those who don’t know, Easington Colliery provided the backdrop in the iconic opening scenes of “Billy Elliott”. If you haven’t seen the film I highly recommend it.
I am British — proud of it — but my connection to Africa is not professional convenience. It is personal and permanent. My wife was born in Mozambique, and both our children were born on this continent, growing up with Africa as their home. I witnessed my son’s first word, “dabo”, I thought he was trying to say “Dad” – his Ethiopian nanny knew what he meant and gave him a small piece of soft bread, an unforgettable lesson in Amharic. So when I write about tourism leakage, about revenue leaving African economies and returning to headquarters in Amsterdam and Seattle, I am not writing as an outside observer with an academic interest in development economics – I’m not even academic. I am writing as someone whose family is African, whose children’s futures are African, and whose life’s work has become inseparable from this continent’s story. That is not a credential. It is a commitment. And it is precisely that dual perspective — a northern English sense of fair play hardwired in a coal village, sharpened by decades working across African hospitality — that makes what I am about to say feel less like analysis and more like something I have needed to write for a long time.
My journey through hospitality has taught me many things, but the most important, and the second thing that shaped my values is this: trust is everything.
I have witnessed, over the course of a career founded in hotels and resorts in the UK, Mozambique and Ethiopia and more recently Kenya’s vacation rental market, our industry made a deal it did not fully understand. We witnessed the rise of the online travel agencies — Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb — and we delegated our trust to them to grow our business. We handed them our inventory, our pricing, our guest relationships, and ultimately our brand identity. We told ourselves it was growth. And for a while, the numbers agreed with us.
But growth for whom?
Slowly, then all at once, the reality became clear. Our direct channels eroded. Revenue growth slowed. Profit crumbled under commission structures that took 15–25% off the top of every booking. We reacted by defending our rates — and watched occupancy fall. The OTAs, meanwhile, grew markets everywhere, extracted revenue from local economies, and repatriated it to headquarters in the Netherlands (Booking.com), Seattle ( Expedia), Connecticut (KAYAK, Priceline), and San Francisco (AirBNB). We, as operators, allowed this to happen. The internet was the catalyst, and we were unprepared for what it meant.
I am not writing this to assign blame — not to the platforms, and not to ourselves, there is a space and place for everyone and everything. We were solving real problems with the tools available at the time. But I am writing this because we are now approaching an era where artificial intelligence — and specifically, agentic AI — offers us something we have not had in 25 years: a genuine opportunity to take back control. Not for vanity — not merely for profit — but for the good of our economies, our communities, and our environment.
That opportunity is real, from my research it is evidence-based, and the window to act is now.
How Tourism Became Extractive
While I was researching for this article, I came across Maryangel Nnamdi’s essay via LinkedIn “The $140 Billion Question: Why Africa Captures just 5% of Global Tourism when it should own 20%” (1) which drew my attention and resonated precisely with what has conflicted me for so long. Maryangel writes a compelling synthesis of these dynamics that is essential reading. For every $100 a tourist spends on a holiday in Africa, only a small share typically stays in the destination economy once imports, foreign-owned operators, and international intermediaries take their cut; in many package-tour structures, import-related leakage alone is commonly cited in the 40–50% range.(2) The United Nations World Tourism Organisation’s Director for Africa, Elicia Grandcourt, stated this precisely at the 5th Africa Tourism Leadership Forum in Gaborone: “In most all-inclusive package tours, about 80% of travellers’ expenditures go to the airlines, hotels and other international companies, who often have their headquarters in the travellers’ home countries, and not to local businesses or workers. The average import-related leakage for most developing countries today is between 40% and 50% of gross tourism earnings.” (2)
The continent holds some of the world’s most extraordinary natural, cultural, and ecological assets, yet captures just 5% of global tourism receipts — a share that has remained stubbornly stagnant for two decades despite significant growth in arrivals.(3) The 2025 State of the African Industry Report: Ignite Africa!, released at WTM Africa, documents multiple billion-dollar tourism market segments that Africa is currently failing to serve — among them, neurodivergent travellers representing a US$60 billion global opportunity, a segment that Africa’s natural, low-stimulation environments are uniquely suited to attract, yet almost entirely unaddressed in the current tourism offer. (4)
To understand how this happened — and why AI changes it — we need to call the system out for what it is.
Scholars who study the global economy have long observed that it operates less like a level playing field and more like a structured hierarchy. You don’t need to be a scholar to know this, ask anyone from Africa and they will not only tell you, they’ll give you a really good example of how this works in their own backyard. Wealthy, technologically dominant nations capture the value-added layers of any industry — the brand, the distribution, the data, the customer relationship — while resource-rich regions supply the raw inputs – think chocolate, coffee. In tourism, Africa supplies the raw input: the landscapes, the wildlife, the cultures, the warmth, the stories. Core-nation companies based in wealthy, technologically dominant nations that extract value capture the value-added layer: the platform, the algorithm, the booking engine, the commission.
This is not an accident. It is extractive architecture: a system designed so the destination supplies the experience, but the highest‑margin layers—distribution, payments, data, and brand—are controlled elsewhere, so value leaks out by default.
When the internet arrived, it created a brilliant but deeply asymmetric bargain for STR operators and independent hotels. Booking.com, Expedia, and Airbnb solved a genuine problem: a traveller in London had no way to verify whether a guesthouse in Nairobi was safe, clean, or honest. These platforms stepped in and said: trust us. They aggregated inventory, standardised listings, collected reviews, processed payments, and guaranteed resolution if things went wrong. In exchange, they charged us 15–25% on every booking — and kept the customer relationship, the data, and the brand recognition entirely for themselves.
The property became a commodity. The platform became the brand.
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu writing in ‘The Forms of Capital’ (1986) argued that real power in any economy does not come only from money. It comes from trust and legitimacy — what he called symbolic capital: borrowed credibility and legitimacy that makes people trust a brand enough to transact without a direct relationship. The accumulated reputation that makes people defer to you without question – think of the booking.com review score for that guesthouse in Nairobi. OTA dominance is not just financial. It is symbolic: their brand carries a weight of legitimacy that substitutes for the direct relationship travellers cannot have with an unfamiliar property in an unfamiliar city. OTAs monetised our trust gap and banked the proceeds as their own symbolic capital.
And here is the most insidious part: independent hotel operators and STR managers stayed on OTAs — and largely still do — not simply because they were forced to, but because everyone else was doing it. Organisational theorists call this institutional isomorphism: when a practice becomes so universal that departing from it feels riskier than accepting its costs. Questioning it, building alternatives, investing in direct channels — these felt marginal, even eccentric. The OTA model became institutional gravity: the industry’s inertia that keeps operators orbiting the same channels because leaving feels riskier than paying the commission. I know this gravity intimately. I have felt it myself. And I am writing this because this gravity needs to shift.
The World Is Moving — And Africa Is Rising
Before we talk about what AI changes, it is worth understanding the moment we are operating in — because the external environment is moving in Africa's favour in ways that have nothing to do with technology.
Global tourism is in robust health. International tourist arrivals grew 5% in the first half of 2025, reaching nearly 690 million visitors — 4% above pre-pandemic levels. (5) As Landry Signé observed in his 2018 Brookings analysis, (3) the thesis of a rising global middle class travelling more is proving correct: movement of people across borders is accelerating, and tourism is one of the most dynamic sectors of the global economy.
Africa is the standout performer. The continent recorded 12% year-on-year growth in arrivals in H1 2025, the highest of any global region. Africa welcomed around 75 million visitors in 2024, generating $43 billion, with tourism representing 41% of total services exports (5) — a higher ratio than any other region on earth. UN Tourism data shows Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa both achieved double-digit growth, led by Egypt, Ethiopia, Morocco, South Africa, and Kenya.
Meanwhile, the United States — historically one of the world's great tourism magnets — is experiencing a self-inflicted decline that is redirecting high-value travellers elsewhere. International arrivals to the US fell 6% in 2025 (6), during a period when every other global region grew, with foreign tourist spending dropping a further 7% as arrivals from Canada, Mexico and Europe all declined. A new $250 “visa integrity fee” — charged on top of existing visa costs and applicable to all non-immigrant visa holders under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (7) — compounded the deterrent effect of entry bans, social media screening requirements, and a pervasive atmosphere of unwelcome that deterred even eligible travellers. The World Travel and Tourism Council projected the US would lose $12.5 billion in international visitor spending in 2025 — making it the only country among 184 economies forecast to see a decline — with arrivals from Germany down 28%, the UK down 15%, and Canada shedding more than 20% of early summer bookings. (8)
The travellers who previously chose the US are actively seeking alternatives. Long-haul destinations with growing reputations — Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Morocco, Tanzania — are among the direct beneficiaries. These are exactly the high-spending, values-conscious, internationally mobile travellers that Africa's regenerative tourism narrative speaks to most powerfully.
The intra-African story is equally important. The African middle class is building its travel habits now, in the AI era, and intra-Africa travel is among the fastest-growing segments on the continent—at a time when more countries are offering visa-free access to African travellers. These travellers are not habituated to OTA dominance in the way Western travellers are. They respond powerfully to authenticity, local ownership, and community connection. They are the first proof of concept for a direct, AI-native African booking ecosystem. Africa’s love of football is legendary and there are plenty of events on the horizon, including Morocco capitalising on its recent hosting of AFCON and co-hosting the World Cup in 2030 alongside Spain and Portugal. Now is a perfect time to be reminded of Africa’s experience of hosting the World Cup.
The 2010 World Cup is a perfect and publicly documented case study and is textbook tourism architecture:
- A global governing body (FIFA) appointed a foreign commercial intermediary (MATCH) to control the accommodation pool
- International hotel chains captured the premium accommodation investment and remitted management fees abroad
- South African individual property owners — the grassroots economic base — were cut out of the distribution chain entirely
- Government spent R39.3 billion and the primary financial beneficiaries were multinational construction companies and FIFA’s commercial partners
- The tourism inflow was real; the local revenue retention was structurally limited
Fast forward to AFCON 2027 in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. In my view, the same architecture will assert itself by default — unless East African STR operators, independent hotel owners, and their governments deliberately build a different distribution model in advance. With AI-native direct booking infrastructure, community trust certification, and collective data standards in place before the tournament, the pattern of 2010 can be interrupted.
The revenue that leaves African tourism economies does not do so because Africa lacks travellers. It does so because Africa lacks control of the distribution layer. That is what we have to change.
The OTA Trust Crisis: What the Data Actually Shows
Before we talk about the future, we need to be honest about the present — because the OTA model is not just economically extractive. It is increasingly broken at the trust level, and the data is unambiguous.
Independent hotel operators and STR managers have long known what the Reddit forums now document publicly: Airbnb, Booking.com, and Expedia have a structural conflict of interest baked into their dispute resolution systems. OTAs earn commission from bookings, so they need guests to keep booking. Guest satisfaction scores appear on app stores and affect OTA brand reputation – check your app store, you’ll likely not find an OTA app below 4.7 out of 5. Host and operator satisfaction does not reflect in these scores. The commercial incentive, therefore, systematically biases dispute resolution toward guests — even in cases where guests are demonstrably in the wrong.
Academic research confirms this. A 2025 peer-reviewed study in SAGE Journals (9) found that hosts consistently perceived Airbnb as prioritising guest satisfaction over host protection during disputes. Research on host wellbeing found that platform-mediated conflicts have become one of the most significant sources of operator distress, driven precisely by this power asymmetry. The specific pattern — guests threatening negative reviews to extract refunds or discounts, with platforms defaulting to guest refunds in ambiguous cases — is now so common that an entire service industry has emerged around helping operators navigate it.
Airbnb's AirCover programme was marketed as the solution. In practice, hosts report claims being underpaid, dismissed for technicalities, or partially awarded even with full photographic evidence. This matters beyond individual frustration. It represents the slow erosion of operator trust in the platforms that were supposed to be our partners. And it creates a powerful argument for direct relationships: when you own the booking, you own the terms, the evidence, the communication record, and the resolution. You do not need a platform to adjudicate — or to take its 16% while doing so imperfectly. The OTA model built its dominance on trust. It is now eroding that same trust from both sides — guests increasingly frustrated by inconsistent service, and operators increasingly certain the system is not designed for them.
The AI Disruption: When the Agent Becomes the Trust Layer
Something fundamental is changing in how people search, plan, and book travel. In 2024, 51% of US travellers used general search engines as their primary travel research tool. By late 2025, that figure had dropped to 36%. (19) In its place, AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini — more than doubled in usage for travel research over 18 months, rising from 6% to 15% of US travellers. A growing share of travellers no longer type into a search bar and click a link. They ask a question, and they act on the answer their AI tool gives them. This might sound like a subtle shift. It is not. It is a structural reordering of the entire discovery economy that OTAs were built on. OTA power rested on platform trust as a proxy — meaning the guest trusted the platform’s brand and guarantees as a substitute for knowing (or being able to verify) the individual property. Your guest trusted Booking.com because they didn’t yet have enough information to trust your individual property directly, so the platform’s reputation stood in for the relationship you hadn’t had a chance to build. The platform’s brand substituted for the direct relationship the guest couldn’t realistically form in advance—especially with a small guesthouse in Lamu or a lakeside retreat in Entebbe—so the booking decision defaulted to the intermediary’s credibility. OTAs monetised that trust gap for two decades.
That ‘proxy trust’ solved a real problem at scale, but it also shifted the customer relationship, the data, and the pricing leverage away from operators and into the platform.
An AI agent changes the fundamental equation. When a traveller asks their AI assistant to ‘find me a genuinely community-positive villa in Malindi for five nights in April,’ the AI no longer needs an OTA’s brand as a trust proxy—it can evaluate trust directly from verifiable property-level signals such as reviews, certifications, fee transparency, response-time records, and community-impact reporting. If those signals are strong and consistent, the OTA brand becomes less necessary as the middle step between guest and property. One commentator on agentic AI in travel puts it well: "Trust is the new scarce resource. Symbolic capital flows toward actors who consistently deliver grounded, low-latency, no-surprises outcomes.” (10) The winner is not necessarily the biggest platform. It is the most verifiably trustworthy supplier — and that can be an independent hotel or an STR brand.
This is the disintermediation thesis in plain language: AI could shift the symbolic capital — the trust and legitimacy that Bourdieu identified as the real source of market power — from platforms back to properties. And that shift, if Africa and the global independent hospitality community act deliberately, could redirect billions of dollars that currently leave our economies and communities.
What AI Actually Reads: The Social Platform Revelation
Here is where the evidence becomes both surprising and empowering for independent operators. A landmark 2025 study by Cloudbeds (11) — the hospitality industry’s first comprehensive study of its kind — submitted 810 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini using automated testing tools across six global destinations. A 2026 follow-up study by HotelRank.ai (12) ran nearly 20,000 AI sessions across 2,500 unique prompts in 25 cities, collecting over 245,000 source URLs that the AI models actually cited — making it possible to see, precisely, which websites each model consulted to form its recommendations. Their findings reshape the entire conversation about distribution.
First finding: AI sends guests directly to properties, not OTAs. Despite heavily consulting OTA data to form their answers, all four major AI models overwhelmingly route recommendation links directly to property websites. ChatGPT sent 91% of hotel links directly to property websites. Gemini sent 89%, ChatGPT’s previous model sent 88%, and Perplexity sent 75% directly. AI learns from OTAs but bypasses them when sending the guest. This is the disintermediation mechanism operating in real time, today.
Second finding: each AI model has its own trust hierarchy — and they differ significantly. This matters because operators need to know which platforms to prioritise:
- Grok is the broadest scanner, consulting an average of 58 sources per response. It cites TripAdvisor (99.9%), Expedia (96.4%), and Hotels.com (81.7%) — but also Facebook Groups (63.5%) and Reddit (54.5%), making it the most social-media-influenced model
- Gemini is the most OTA-reliant, citing Booking.com in 63% of responses and Expedia in 37%. It also draws from YouTube (14%) — which makes sense given Google’s ownership. If Gemini does not see you on Booking.com, it may not see you at all
- Perplexity cites TripAdvisor in 95.5% of responses — driven partly by a commercial partnership between the two companies — making TripAdvisor presence close to mandatory for Perplexity visibility
- ChatGPT has evolved fastest. Earlier ChatGPT relied heavily on Wikipedia (75%) and Reddit (15%). Current ChatGPT has dramatically widened its search, now citing Booking.com (54%), hotel brand sites (Marriott 31%, Hilton 17%), and The Times (20%). Reddit dropped from 15% to 2.3% between versions. YouTube citations are now beginning to emerge as a new signal
Third finding: African cities currently have the weakest direct property footprint in AI recommendations of any market studied. Cairo recorded the highest OTA citation rate of any of the 25 cities studied at 42.4% — meaning AI is far more likely to route Cairo hotel recommendations through an OTA than for any European or North American city. Mid-market 3-star properties globally face OTA citation rates of 28.8% — nearly three times the rate for 5-star properties. African properties are currently among those most dependent on OTA intermediation in AI recommendations. That is not a ceiling. It is a starting point — and it frames the urgency of building AI-ready, direct-channel infrastructure now, before these patterns solidify.
The full picture of what AI reads when deciding whether to recommend your property includes:
- Review scores and sentiment across Google, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com
- Recurring themes in guest comments — not just star ratings, but the actual language guests use
- How you respond to both positive and negative reviews
- Consistency of your information across all platforms — Current ChatGPT now scans an average of 27 sources per query, meaning inconsistency is increasingly detectable
- Mentions in social media conversations, travel blogs, and community forums
- Guest-generated photos and videos that validate the stated experience
- The authority and clarity of your own website, including how well it is structured for machine reading
The strategic implication is clear: there is no single platform that dominates all AI models. The only durable strategy is a consistent, authoritative, and authentic presence everywhere that counts — your website, TripAdvisor, Google, Booking.com, YouTube, and community platforms. AI does not favour the biggest marketing budget. It favours the richest, most coherent, most human digital footprint — and that is something a community-rooted independent operator can build more authentically than any global platform can manufacture on their behalf.
The data on AI-driven direct booking growth is still forming. What we can say with confidence is this: IDC (13) forecasts that 30% of all travel bookings will be executed by AI agents by 2030. The Cloudbeds and HotelRank studies show AI is already routing 75–91% of recommendations directly to property websites today. The operators who are building AI-ready infrastructure now — structured data, direct booking engines, authentic social footprints — are positioning to capture that shift when it fully materialises. The window to build is now, before the pattern solidifies.
The OTA Blind Spot
The major platforms are not standing still. Booking Holdings, Expedia, and Airbnb are all racing to build their own AI assistants — trying to become the AI agent their customers use, so that disintermediation never happens. If your agent is Booking.com’s agent, the commission model survives. Brian Chesky of Airbnb has publicly argued that while AI tools can distribute travel, “cutting out OTAs is very difficult.“(14) On the surface, this confidence appears well-founded.
But look more carefully, and the defensive architecture has a structural crack running through it.
The loyalty programme trap. OTAs are investing heavily in loyalty schemes — Booking.com’s Genius tiers, Expedia’s One Key programme — designed to create switching costs that make leaving the platform financially painful for travellers. Even an AI agent acting on a traveller’s behalf must account for accumulated points, status benefits, and member-only discounts when comparing a direct booking against an OTA listing. On paper, this looks like an unassailable moat.
What most operators do not realise is that these loyalty discounts are also, in effect, a sophisticated rate parity workaround. Rate parity clauses — contractual requirements embedded in most OTA agreements — oblige properties to offer the OTA the same or lower rate than any other channel, including their own website. This prevents operators from simply undercutting the OTA on price to drive direct bookings. OTAs have turned this constraint into an offensive weapon: by offering Genius or member prices subsidised through their own margin or charged back to properties through participation fees, they manufacture an effectively lower price for loyalty members — without technically breaching the published rate parity clause. The property lists at parity; the OTA manufactures the discount. The result is that your direct channel appears more expensive to the traveller, and the AI agent optimising for total value may still recommend the OTA.
The regulatory opening. This is not an inescapable trap — and this is where independent operators need to pay attention. Wide rate parity has been progressively dismantled by competition regulators across Europe. Germany’s Federal Cartel Office ruled wide rate parity clauses in hotel contracts illegal under competition law in 2015.(15) France banned them by statute through the Loi Macron the same year.(16) The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority secured binding undertakings from Booking.com and Expedia to drop wide rate parity in 2015.(17) Across most European markets, operators can now legally offer lower rates on their own direct channels than on any OTA. In many African markets, including Kenya, these clauses remain in contracts but are largely unenforced — meaning operators may be honouring restrictions that have no legal teeth, simply because no one has challenged them.
The blind spot itself. All of the OTAs’ defensive strategies — AI assistants, loyalty programmes, rate parity enforcement — share a common assumption: that the traveller comes to the OTA first. They are designed to retain users already inside the funnel. None of them address the scenario that is growing by the month: a traveller who interacts only with their own independent AI assistant, which searches across all available options and books the best one directly — never visiting a platform homepage. That assistant cannot be advertised to. It cannot be enrolled in a loyalty programme. It reasons over data, and it routes to whoever has the cleanest, most trustworthy, most complete information at the property level.
There is a further irony that platform theory research identifies: the more an OTA invests in trust infrastructure — better verification, richer reviews, stronger guarantees — the more it creates precisely the data signals that a third-party AI agent can use to route past it entirely.(18) The platforms are building the very infrastructure that makes their own disintermediation possible.
The strategic response for independent operators. The answer to OTA loyalty stickiness is not to compete on OTA terms — it is to build direct relationships that an OTA cannot replicate. Where rate parity regulations permit it, publish a transparent direct-rate advantage. Build your own direct loyalty in the form that matters most to your guests: a genuine community relationship, a personalised hosting experience, a regenerative tourism proposition with documented local impact. An AI agent asked to find accommodation for a traveller who prioritises community benefit and local ownership will not find that value in a Genius tier. That is a competitive position no points programme can manufacture — and it is one that African STR brands and independent hotels are uniquely positioned to own.
The window to build it is now, before the next generation of institutional norms locks in and we find ourselves dependent on a new set of platforms we did not build and do not control.
Africa's Specific Moment
Africa's opportunity is not just about technology. It is about timing, narrative, and a growing global consciousness that tourism has been extractive for too long.
The regenerative tourism movement — travel that actively restores communities, environments, and cultures rather than merely extracting from them — is gaining serious momentum among exactly the traveller segments most likely to use AI assistants: educated, values-driven, globally mobile travellers willing to pay premium prices for experiences with traceable community impact. We believe that there are many travellers being redirected away from the United States by its current political climate — and they are looking for destinations that feel genuinely welcoming, authentic, and worth their investment.
Here is the connection that matters: regenerative tourism credentials are precisely the kind of trust signal that AI agents can parse and act on. When a traveller asks their AI for "a stay that genuinely benefits the local community in Zanzibar," no Booking.com algorithm can answer that from a standard listing. But a property that has published structured, verifiable data about local employment, supplier sourcing, community investment, and environmental practices can. The AI can reason over it. The AI can recommend it — and will in future — book it directly.
This is not a marginal advantage. It is a category-defining one.
The regulatory environment is also shifting in our favour. Kenya's 2026 decision to extend the tourism levy to short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com is an early signal that African governments are beginning to assert sovereignty over the digital distribution layer. That levy revenue, directed strategically, could seed the shared infrastructure Africa needs to compete.
The global system that concentrated OTA power was built over 25 years. It will not be dismantled overnight. But history shows that when a technological disruption breaks institutional norms, a brief window opens in which the architecture can be rebuilt differently. That door is open right now.
This Is Africa’s Moment
I began this article with a simple truth: trust is everything. I have spent a career watching our industry hand that trust to intermediaries who monetised it brilliantly — and I have spent the last several years thinking about how the cycle could be broken. This is why I developed Alkebulan Homes & Villas — on the conviction that we can earn it back, one guest relationship at a time.
The evidence in this article is not theoretical. The structural leakage of tourism revenue away from African economies — documented by the UNWTO at 40–50% of gross earnings — is real. The 6% fall in US international arrivals in 2025, in a year when every other global region grew, is real. The data showing AI already routes 75–91% of hotel recommendations directly to property websites is real. The regulatory openings on rate parity are real. The opportunity is real.
What is not yet real — but is within reach — is a deliberate, coordinated response from African STR operators, independent hotels, and the governments and tourism bodies that represent them. The agentic AI era does not favour the biggest platform. It favours the most trustworthy supplier. And trust — genuine, verifiable, community-rooted trust — is something Africa has in extraordinary abundance. Africa has the landscapes, the cultures, the warmth, the stories. It has always had them. What it lacked is the distribution infrastructure to make them visible on our own terms.
That infrastructure is now buildable. The missing piece is a shared, Africa-led trust and data layer. Instead of a thousand isolated sites, we need a common platform where verifiable property and community-impact data are structured once and read everywhere—by travellers and by AI. Alkebulan Homes & Villas is open to partnering with operators, hosts, technologists, and investors to build that platform as an AI-native, Africa-first layer of trust, not another extractive intermediary. The tools exist and the people who know how to do it need to grab the opportunity — nothing is holding them back. The data standards are being written. The AI models are already reading us — and as the HotelRank data shows, they are currently reading African properties through OTA intermediaries because we have not yet given them a better signal to read. We can change that. We must change that.
AFCON 2027 in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda is eighteen months away. The 2030 FIFA World Cup in Morocco is four years away. These are not just sporting events — they are the largest destination marketing opportunities East and North Africa have ever had, and they will arrive whether we are ready or not. If we build now — AI-ready websites, direct booking infrastructure, structured community impact data, authentic social footprints — we capture the demand surge on our own terms. If we do not, we will watch another generation of tourism revenue flow through platforms we did not build to economies that are not ours.
I am not interested in dismantling the platforms. They serve a purpose, and they will continue to. What I am interested in is rebalancing the relationship — moving from dependency to partnership, from commodity to brand, from platform tenant to direct host. The AI era makes that rebalancing possible for the first time in 25 years.
The door is open. The question is whether we walk through it together.
If this article resonated with you — whether you are an STR operator, an independent hotelier, a tourism investor, or someone who believes Africa’s tourism economy should work for Africa — I would like to hear from you. Connect with me on LinkedIn. The conversation we need to have is bigger than any single article and any single person, and it starts here.
References
(1) Maryangel Nnamdi, “The $140 Billion Question: Why Africa Captures just 5% of Global Tourism when it should own 20%” https://medium.com/@ryangel46/the-140-billion-question-why-africa-captures-just-5-of-global-tourism-when-it-should-own-20-2f29545fb7d0
(2) Elicia Grandcourt, UNWTO Regional Director for Africa, speaking at the 5th Africa Tourism Leadership Forum, Gaborone, October 26, 2022. Reported by 360Mozambique/SABC News: https://360mozambique.com/world/africa/revenue-leakages-in-tourism-deeply-affect-african-countries-economies-unwto/
(3) Landry Signé, “Africa’s Tourism Potential: Trends, Drivers, Opportunities, and Strategies,” Brookings Institution, December 2018, p.3: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/africas-tourism-potential_landrysigne1.pdf
(4) 2025 State of the African Industry Report: Ignite Africa!, Africa Travel Week / Reed Exhibitions, released at WTM Africa, May 2025. Reported by RX Global: https://rxglobal.com/africa-missing-out-us60bn-tourism-markets-new-report-warns
(5) UN Tourism, World Tourism Barometer, September 2025 / @UNWTO post, 10 September 2025: https://www.untourism.int/un-tourism-world-tourism-barometer-data
(6) Reuters, “Fewer foreigners visited US in 2025 as global tourism spending rose,” 14 January 2026: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/fewer-foreigners-visited-us-2025-global-tourism-spending-rose-2026-01-14/
(7) CNBC, “Travelers to the U.S. must pay a new $250 ‘visa integrity fee’,” 18 July 2025: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/18/visa-integrity-fee-what-to-know-about-new-travel-fee-to-enter-the-us-.html
(8) World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), “U.S. Economy Set to Lose $12.5BN in International Traveler Spend This Year,” 13 May 2025: https://wttc.org/news/us-economy-set-to-lose-12-5bn-in-international-traveler-spend-this-year
(9) Abdurakhmanov, D. et al., “The Influence of Platform Crisis Management on Airbnb Host Trust,” Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Insights, SAGE Publications, 15 October 2025: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/27652157251385664
(10) Abdurakhmanov, D. (2025). Agentic AI Will Reshape Travel Management in 2025: Platforms, Power, and the New Value of Trust. Independent Researcher. StuLib. https://www.stulib.com/post/agentic-ai-will-reshape-travel-management-in-2025-platforms-power-and-the-new-value-of-trust
(11) Cloudbeds, “The Signals Behind Hotel AI Recommendations,” June 2025:https://www.cloudbeds.com/hotel-ai-recommendations
(12) HotelRank.ai, “AI Hotel Landscape 2026,” January 2026: https://www.hotelrank.ai/research/ai-hotel-landscape-2026
(13) IDC, “Agentic AI Will Redefine Travel and Hospitality in 2026,” February 2026 https://www.idc.com/resource-center/blog/agentic-ai-will-redefine-travel-and-hospitality-in-2026/
(14) LinkedIn/Skift — “Airbnb CEO on ChatGPT: ‘Very Difficult’ to Replace OTAs” (October 2025): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/skift_airbnbs-brian-chesky-chatgpt-can-distribute-activity-7387037088891805696-TpSY
(15) Bundeskartellamt (German Federal Cartel Office) — Decision on Booking.com rate parity clauses (December 2015): https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidung/EN/Fallberichte/Missbrauchsaufsicht/2015/B9-121-13.html
(16) Loi Macron (Loi n° 2015-990 du 6 août 2015) — Article 133, prohibiting wide rate parity clauses in hotel distribution contracts, France (August 2015)
(17) UK Competition and Markets Authority — “Online hotel booking: CMA secures commitments from Booking.com and Expedia” (September 2015): https://www.gov.uk/cma-cases/online-hotel-booking
(18) Grace Gu and Feng Zhu, “Trust and Disintermediation: Evidence from an Online Freelance Marketplace,” Management Science, Vol. 67, No. 2, February 2021, pp. 794–807. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3583. Summarised for platform practitioners by Joost Rietveld, “Trust and Platform Disintermediation,” Platform Papers, 15 August 2022: https://platformpapers.substack.com/p/trust-and-platform-disintermediation
(19) Phocuswright, cited in Mikael Quilfen, “AI is replacing travel search,” LinkedIn, 26 January 2026: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-replacing-travel-search-youre-answer-market-mikael-quilfen-g888e