Touristlink, a social travel website has raised undisclosed seed funding from a group of investors including Y Combinator-style African accelerator, 88mph.ac.
The Kenya-based accelerator invests in startups seeking to expand into the African market.
Touristlink, the India-based company will use this new fund to develop the website and expand into Africa.
Part of the strategy is to fix Africa's fragmented safari market by aggregating offerings from multiple tour operators into its platform where users can review them, discuss with other users and make bookings.
Touristlink connects travellers with local tour providers, and connects fellow travellers too. Users will be able to search for destinations, read about places to visit, things to do, read and write reviews, share their trip with friends, and also book travel products online.
The company claims sales of $25,000 in January this year, and in June the sales figure increased to $96,000.
Touristlink believes it has been able to scale its marketplace by adding a social feature where users can interact with each other, if not transacting.
Currently, the company works with Indian tour operators and lists 950+ tours and activities on the site.
Founder of Touristlink, David Urmann says:
“Most people are happy with Facebook as their only social network and don’t need another option but travel is the one situation where you have people looking to broaden their networks and meet new people.”
Touristlink [TLabs here] was launched in November of 2011 and currently it has a Spanish and Portuguese version of its English site.
For further reading on the travel tech industry landscape in Africa, see this detailed article covering various investment communities that helps startups, the local mobile payment service M-Pesa, the growing revenue streams on safari market and much more.