The journey of a thousand miles begins with a step, they say, and that’s how wakanow.com came to be. Founder of wakanow.com, Obinna Ekezie, had no idea when he was enrolled in the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 1999 that he would have an early retirement from a successful professional basketball career to start up a travel agency.
He left Nigeria at 18 for the United States, where he received a full athletic scholarship at the University of Maryland from 1995 – 1999 and played for five teams in the NBA. He also represented Nigeria at the World Championships of Basketball in Athens, Greece in 1998. Due to an injury that occurred in 2005, he began to think about life after basketball. On one of his trips back home, he discovered the awesome opportunity in the Nigerian travel industry.
Travelling can be quite tedious, from booking the transport service, packing, having to deal with luggage, the cost of travel will also be considered, and how about choosing the location? All these and more could make one end a trip that hasn’t even started. That’s where Wakanow.com comes in, it’s a platform that stepped in with the goal to resolve those problems.
Obinna Ekezie, the pioneer of Wakanow.com recalled that when he came back to Nigeria and tried to book a flight, travel agencies were apathetic and online booking was non-existent. In addition, getting decent travel deals was a hurdle while payment was even more worrisome since back then electronic payment with credit cards had not come into use. Before his next visit, however, there was tremendous change as internet infiltration was opening up to the use of electronic payment cards, and the prospects of making travel bookings from anywhere at the press of a button became possible.
Few facts you may not know about Wakanow.com
- In February 2008, Obinna Ekezie in Partnership with a friend Ralph Tamuno started the company.
- It’s a Nigerian web-based travel logistics company.
- Wakanow was initially known as Zeep Travel, a closed B2B hotel reservation online platform for travel agents, but after a rough 2year journey, Zeep Travel – which evolved to Wakanow, gained significant grounds when it was selected as the official ticketer for the South African 2010 World cup.
- Wakanow.com is one of African’s leading online travel booking service.
- Still, in 2010 a CNBC Wakanow feature gave the brand, even more, publicity, and was seen by executives of the New York-based multi-billion dollar investor Tiger Global, resulting in an undisclosed multimillion-dollar venture capital investment in the travel technology start-up.
- Since inception, the site has recorded over 700,000 travel bookings and counting.
- Wakanow has also launched an African travel booking platform – Destination Africa (DA), a one-stop travel booking platform for all categories of African travels.
- Notable honours under the site’s belt are Tony Elumelu’s fastest growing company awards and a host of others.
The major focus of Wakanow.com is to provide relevant information to customers with regards to organizing local and foreign trips. The website offers its clients information relating to flight fares, airport pickups, hotel reservations, visa assistance and many other travel services. Wakanow shows no signs of slowing down, particularly now when there’s more competition in the travel Industry to contend with.
