South African fintech startup TurnStay, which helps African travel businesses get paid by international guests, has processed more than ZAR1 billion (US$61.5 million) in transactions so far this year – a milestone reached in just six months, and only three years after the company was founded.
Founded by experienced entrepreneurs Alon Stern, co-founder of Slide Financial, and James Hedley, co-founder of Quicket, TurnStay reduces the cost of getting paid for African merchants and platforms in travel and tourism by harnessing the same “tricks” used by the world’s biggest booking companies.
Through a merchant-of-record model combined with payment orchestration, TurnStay processes card payments in the traveller’s home country and settles funds locally, utilising stablecoins. This approach lowers payment fees by up to 70 per cent, shortens settlement times, and improves booking conversion rates.
The startup raised a US$300,000 pre-seed round in 2024, following that up with US$2 million in seed funding last year, and is now preparing for a Series A raise to fund its continued expansion across the continent.
“Getting paid can be expensive in the travel industry, and for a long time African merchants have carried a much heavier cost than their overseas counterparts for doing exactly the same job,” said Stern. “We’ve built our business around closing that gap, and the traction we are getting tells us the model works and merchants value it.”
Where traditional local payment processing for foreign travel bookings can cost merchants as much as eight per cent of the transaction, TurnStay says its clients pay from as little as 1.6 per cent, roughly half the going rate. The saving comes from combining a merchant-of-record model with modern payment rails that include stablecoins to move funds across borders quickly and at low cost.
“The less merchants pay in fees, the more money stays in Africa,” said Stern. “That’s the philosophy behind everything we build. The experiences African travel businesses offer are already world-class. We think the payment infrastructure behind them should be too.”
TurnStay clients span luxury safari lodges, tour operators, villa agencies and other travel merchants across the continent, including Singita, Safari.com, Londolozi and The Capital. The company remains focused on building pan-African travel payments infrastructure, with South Africa as its current base and growing activity in markets including Mauritius, Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana.
“Three years ago there were two of us and an idea,” said Stern. “Now we’re processing over a billion rand every six months for some of the best-known names in African travel, and we have just begun.”
