As Africa’s travel and tourism sector continues to expand, many of the operators powering that growth remain reliant on manual processes and fragmented digital tools to manage bookings, customer communication and payments. For Kinsley Ndenge and Stephen Mutua, co-founders of South African travel-tech startup, Zuru, that imbalance was impossible to ignore.
In an exclusive interview with Techparley Africa, Kinsley said this operational gap inspired the creation of Zuru, a platform designed to consolidate travel and tour business workflows into a single operating environment.
“Tourism in Africa is growing, especially South Africa, but the operators at the heart of that growth remain operationally stuck in the past,” Kinsley told Techparley Africa. “Zuru was built on the recognition that local tour and activity businesses are being left behind due to the lack of operational tools that can scale with these increases in tourist numbers.”
That divergence, he argued, risks constraining one of the continent’s most promising experience-driven sectors, particularly as African travellers themselves begin to account for a larger share of movement across regional corridors.
What You Need to Know About Zuru
Zuru is an end-to-end booking and operations platform built for tour operators, activity providers and adventure companies seeking to manage reservations, generate professional quotes and collect payments from one dashboard.
“Our mission is to showcase the beauty of Africa by empowering African operators with tools that can help them to operate and grow,” Kinsley said.
The platform enables operators to configure experiences ranging from timed daily activities to multi-day itineraries incorporating transport and accommodation, while also providing branded storefront pages, automated guest communications and integrated payment processing.
According to the company, the goal is to reduce administrative workload and improve operational visibility across the booking lifecycle.
Zuru’s mission, Kinsley added, is to empower African operators with tools that enable them to scale alongside rising tourist numbers while showcasing the continent’s experiences more effectively.
How The Platform Works
Central to Zuru’s positioning is its insistence that it is not merely a booking tool. Kinsley frames the platform as a command centre spanning booking management, customer acquisition, distribution through the Zuru marketplace, team coordination, payments and brand presence, layers typically handled through disconnected systems or manual processes.
Operators can configure timed activities, multi-day expeditions incorporating transport and accommodation, and tiered pricing structures, all within a branded storefront environment. Role-based access allows guides, administrators and staff to collaborate operationally, while multi-currency payment support reflects the cross-border nature of African tourism flows.
This breadth of functionality, Kinsley argues, distinguishes Zuru from global travel-tech solutions that typically address isolated workflow segments.
Global platforms serving tour operators often specialise in discrete capabilities such as reservation management or channel distribution. But many were designed for markets with established payment rails, formalised operator ecosystems and standardised experience categories.
“Where most travel-tech platforms serving SMEs globally focus narrowly on one of these functions, Zuru integrates all of them into a single product purpose-built for the African market,” Kinsley said. “Global platforms weren’t designed with the African operator in mind. Zuru is built from that context, not retrofitted into it.”
Business Model And Pricing Strategy
Zuru’s pricing model offers another window into its market thesis. According to the founder, the company operates a three-tier subscription structure comprising a free Basic plan, a Standard tier priced at R1,399 per month and a Premium offering at R2,499 per month.
While freemium strategies are common in SaaS, Kinsley describes Zuru’s approach less as a marketing tactic and more as ecosystem design.
The free tier lowers the barrier for operators entering digital workflows while simultaneously feeding activity into the company’s marketplace layer, a discovery surface where experiences become searchable and bookable.
In this sense, even non-paying users contribute to network density and data accumulation, strengthening platform utility for the broader ecosystem.
“The free tier is a customer acquisition cost, not a revenue drain. The assumption is that operators who experience the value will convert upward as their operations grow,” Kinsley said.
The African tour operator landscape spans a wide operational spectrum, from solo guides running single daily experiences to structured expedition companies coordinating multi-day journeys across teams.
Zuru’s design philosophy attempts to accommodate both ends of that spectrum.
A solo sunset cruise operator can configure availability slots, manage capacity and share a booking link within minutes, while larger operators can extend workflows through API integrations and multi-role team structures. Industry leaders say this duality reflects a broader structural characteristic of African markets.
Where Zuru Is Expanding Next
Following its launch in South Africa, Zuru is preparing expansion into Kenya and Mauritius, markets the company views as strategically aligned with its early tourism corridor thesis.
Alongside geographic rollout, the startup is pursuing partnerships with marketing firms intended to help operators translate operational efficiency into demand growth.
Product development is also shifting toward intelligence-layer capabilities. Planned releases include AI-driven demand forecasting, automated guest communication flows and smart pricing features designed to support revenue optimisation rather than solely workflow management.
The direction suggests Zuru is moving from operational infrastructure toward decision-support infrastructure.
Fragmentation, Not Resistance
One of the more persistent assumptions in travel-tech has been that small and mid-sized operators resist structured software adoption. Kinsley rejects that premise.
Instead, he interprets the widespread use of spreadsheets, WhatsApp and email as evidence of behavioural readiness rather than technological reluctance.
Operators are already operating digitally, sending confirmations, sharing itineraries and maintaining records online. What they lack, he says, is cohesion.
Zuru’s product architecture reflects this interpretation. Rather than forcing behavioural change, the platform embeds itself within existing communication patterns. Each operator receives a shareable booking page that can be distributed through messaging apps, social media or email, effectively transforming familiar channels into conversion pathways.
The approach positions adoption less as transformation and more as consolidation.
An Infrastructure Play On Africa’s Experience Economy
Ultimately, Kinsley frames Zuru not as a vertical SaaS company but as a foundational layer within Africa’s experience economy.
As connectivity expands, middle-class travel grows and regional mobility strengthens, operators able to maintain digital visibility, accept real-time bookings and coordinate teams efficiently will likely capture disproportionate value.
Zuru’s ambition is to sit beneath that evolution.
“Zuru’s long-term positioning is to be the infrastructure layer beneath the African experience economy,” Kinsley said. “The vision is to be what makes all of that possible, not a tool operators use, but the system their entire business runs on.”
Looking ahead, Kinsley believes digital infrastructure will play a defining role in determining which operators succeed as Africa’s experience economy matures.
He argues that operators able to maintain online visibility, accept real-time bookings and coordinate teams efficiently will be better positioned to capture growing regional travel demand.
As Zuru grows, industry leaders say the platform could play a pivotal role in unlocking the continent’s experience economy, enabling smaller providers to compete globally, capture rising intra-African travel demand and ultimately determine how effectively Africa converts its tourism potential into sustained sector growth.
Talking Points
It is encouraging to see Zuru addressing a long-standing operational gap for African tour operators by consolidating quotes, bookings and payments into a single platform built specifically for their workflows.
This approach positions Zuru as a practical response to the fragmented tools many operators currently rely on, offering a pathway toward greater efficiency, professionalism and scalability across the sector.
At Techparley, we recognise how solutions like Zuru can accelerate the digitisation of Africa’s experience economy, empowering independent operators to strengthen their online presence, streamline operations and capture growing regional travel demand.
The platform’s integration of booking management, storefront creation, automated communications and multi-currency payments means operators can run more structured and visible businesses without the complexity traditionally associated with enterprise software.
As the company expands beyond South Africa into additional markets, Zuru has the potential to play a meaningful role in formalising and modernising tour operations across Africa, supporting a more connected, discoverable and globally competitive experience sector.
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