By PurpleCom Editorial | Business & Opportunities
There is an industry quietly getting a complete makeover right now in Nigeria, and most people are sleeping on it.
We are talking about the travel business. Not travel blogging. Not posting vacation pictures on Instagram and calling it content. We are talking about the actual business of facilitating travel — booking flights, arranging hotels, sorting car rentals, and getting paid well to do it. For individuals, groups, corporates, whoever needs to move from Point A to Point B on the planet.
If you have ever had any connection to this space, whether you currently help people book travel on the side, run a small agency, or you have been thinking about starting something in the travel space but kept hitting a wall you did not know how to climb, this article is specifically for you.
Because something has just changed. And it changed everything.
First, Let Us Talk About the Money You Have Been Leaving on the Table
Before we get into what is new, permit us to share some real numbers with you.
Nigeria sends hundreds of thousands of travellers abroad every single year. Business travel. Medical tourism. Education. Hajj and Umrah. Diaspora visits. Leisure holidays. The numbers are growing year on year, even with the naira pressures. African middle-class travel demand is rising. Business travel between African cities is expanding. Religious travel alone runs into billions of naira annually in Nigeria.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: a massive chunk of the money that Nigerian travellers spend on booking travel does not stay in Nigeria. It goes to foreign online travel platforms, international booking apps, and overseas agencies. It leaves. It does not come back.
Why? Because Nigeria does not have enough qualified, trustworthy, well-equipped local travel agents to capture that demand. The supply side of this industry has always been too small, too fragile, and too hard to get into.
That gap is money. And someone is going to fill it. The question is whether it will be you.
Why Has the Travel Business Always Been So Hard to Enter?
To understand why this opportunity matters, you need to understand what you were up against before now. Starting a proper travel agency in Nigeria was genuinely difficult. Not because Nigerians are not smart or hardworking. But because the industry was structured in a way that kept most people out.
Think about what it actually took. You needed IATA accreditation, which is the global licensing body for travel agents. You needed to build or pay for access to a booking technology platform. You needed to establish relationships with airlines and hotel chains before they would take you seriously. You needed to set up a payment processing system that could handle international transactions in foreign currencies. You needed capital, connections, and patience for a bureaucratic process that could drag on for months.
By the time you figured all of that out, most people had either run out of money, run out of patience, or both.
And even the ones who pushed through and got in often found themselves running a fragile operation. Most agents became nothing more than ticket sellers, earning a thin margin on airfares. Airlines tighten commissions and the margin gets thinner. A consumer booking app undercuts the price and the client books direct. A pandemic grounds flights and the whole business evaporates overnight.
There was no framework. No training that taught the actual business of travel, not just how to use a booking platform. No system that gave an agent the tools to build something that could grow. That was the industry. Improvisation dressed up as hustle, and a knowledge gap that nobody was in a hurry to close.
The Fraud Problem That Made It Worse
There is another layer to this that is worth being honest about.
Because the industry had no entry standard, no baseline qualification that separated a trained professional from someone who learned to book flights on a consumer app last week, the door was open to everyone. Including the wrong people.
You already know the stories. Travel agents who collected deposits and disappeared. Group bookings that fell apart at the airport. Visa packages sold with full confidence by people who had no real understanding of the process. Families who lost savings they had put aside for travel.
None of that was unique to Nigeria. It is what happens in any industry that never built a professional floor. When you cannot tell who is qualified and who is not, you cannot trust any of them. And that distrust damaged the legitimate agents too, the ones who actually knew what they were doing but could not prove it because no external standard existed to prove it on.
The consumer always paid the highest price.
Something Just Changed Everything
Now here is where the story turns.
A company called ASL Travels has just done to the travel industry what fintech did to banking about a decade ago.
Cast your mind back to what the POS revolution did. Before POS agents existed, accessing basic banking services meant going to a bank branch, dealing with long queues, and hoping the network was not down. Then fintech platforms came in and did something radical. They took the complex infrastructure of banking, packaged it into a deployable system, and handed it to everyday people. A market woman in Oshodi. A shop owner in Onitsha. A young man running a kiosk in Kano. All of them became what you could reasonably call nano banks for their communities.
You did not need a banking licence. You did not need millions in startup capital. You did not need to understand interbank settlement systems. The platform handled all of that on the backend. You showed up with your customers and your hustle, and you earned.
That is exactly what ASL Travels has done for the travel business.
What ASL Travels Actually Built
ASL Travels has built the entire infrastructure that an independent travel agent needs to run a professional, branded, legitimate travel agency, and made it accessible for a starting fee of ₦25,000.
Not ₦250,000. Not ₦2.5 million. Twenty-five thousand naira.
Let that sit for a moment. Something that was practically impossible without serious capital investment is now accessible for less than what most people spend on a single Saturday outing in Lagos.
But what exactly do you get? This is not an affiliate scheme where you share a link and earn a few hundred naira per referral. When you come on board as an ASL Travels partner, you are setting up an actual travel agency business.
- A branded booking platform in your name, carrying your logo and your chosen domain
- Flight ticket booking, hotel reservations, and car rental capabilities built directly into your platform
- The automation and backend technology that keeps everything running — no servers to manage, no airline contracts to negotiate, no complex GDS data to decode
- The ability to set your own markups on the services you offer
- Commissions that kick in when you hit defined sales thresholds
You own the business. ASL Travels powers it.
This Is Not New Logic. It Is a Proven Model.
If you are wondering whether this can actually work, look at the track record of this exact model in other industries.
Shopify did this for e-commerce. Before Shopify, running an online store required developers, payment gateway integrations you had to negotiate yourself, inventory management systems, and logistics partnerships. It was expensive and slow. Shopify eliminated every one of those barriers. You brought your products. They brought the technology. Thousands of businesses launched overnight that would otherwise have taken years to build.
POS banking did this in financial services. You brought your community. The platform brought the banking infrastructure. Millions of Nigerians now have access to financial services they never had before, served by millions of agent entrepreneurs who built real livelihoods from it.
The pattern is the same every time. When you lower the infrastructure barrier in a high-barrier industry, you do not just create a product. You create an entire new class of entrepreneurs. And you unlock demand that the industry was previously too concentrated and too exclusive to capture.
Travel is that industry right now in Africa.
Who Is This For?
You already help people book flights or arrange travel informally. You do it through WhatsApp. You do it through connections. You do it as a favour that has slowly turned into people expecting the service. You are already in this business, you just have not been getting properly set up or properly paid for it. ASL Travels gives you the structure to turn what you are already doing into a real business with a brand, a booking platform, and a proper commercial arrangement.
You have been thinking about starting something in travel but did not know where to begin. The barriers that were stopping you, the capital, the accreditation, the technology, the complexity, ASL Travels has cleared all of them. The starting point is now clearly defined and accessible.
You are already in the industry but struggling with the bottleneck. You know the business. You have clients. But something in your setup is limiting your growth. Maybe it is the technology. Maybe it is the business model. Maybe it is that you have been selling tickets with no real framework for building beyond that. ASL Travels gives you the infrastructure and the commercial model to go further.
Why This Matters Beyond the Individual
There is a bigger picture here worth understanding.
Nigeria's travel agency sector has historically been largely informal. Most operators are unregistered, uninsured, and unaccountable to any industry body. This means the sector generates little meaningful employment data, attracts no serious institutional investment, and has no collective professional voice with airlines or with government bodies.
The money that Nigerian travellers spend on travel should be creating a growing, formal, professional industry of local travel entrepreneurs. Instead, a significant slice of that spend is captured by foreign online travel platforms because domestic agents cannot compete on professionalism or the range of services a properly equipped operator can offer.
What ASL Travels is building is not just a business opportunity for individuals. It is a formalisation play for an entire sector. Every person who becomes a properly set up, technology-equipped travel agency owner through ASL Travels is one more professional distribution point added to an industry that desperately needs more of them.
That is good for the consumer. Good for the industry. Good for the economy.
The Bottom Line
The travel industry in Nigeria is getting a makeover. The barriers that have kept most people out for decades are coming down. The capital requirement that made it a rich man's game is no longer what it used to be. The technology that required years of negotiation and serious investment to access is now available through a partner model designed for anyone serious enough to show up and build.
₦25,000. A branded agency. A functioning booking platform. Flights, hotels, car rentals. Your markup. Your commissions. Your brand.
You own it. ASL Travels powers it. You grow.
The only real question is whether you get in while the field is still wide open, or you watch someone else in your network do it first and spend the next few years wondering what you were waiting for.
Visit ASLTravels.co to explore available plans and get started →
PurpleCom covers technology, business infrastructure, and digital transformation across Africa. We Help Africans Understand Tech.
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