TurnStay, the South African fintech that helps African travel businesses get paid by international guests, has processed more than R1 billion in transactions so far this year – a milestone reached in just six months, and only three years after the company was founded.
Having raised a $300,000 pre-seed round in 2024 and a $2 million seed round in 2025, TurnStay says it is now preparing for a Series A raise to fund its continued expansion across the continent.
The company, which builds payment infrastructure for hotels, safari lodges, tour operators and villa agencies across the continent, says the growth reflects a problem it was built to solve: African travel businesses have long paid far more than their global competitors just to get paid.
“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,” says Alon Stern, CEO and co-founder of TurnStay.
“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 8% of the transaction, TurnStay says its clients pay from as little as 1,6%, 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.
“Global platforms have used this model for years,” says Stern.
“But what we’ve done is bring that same infrastructure to African travel merchants directly, so a lodge or tour operator doesn’t have to be the size of Airbnb to access it.”
TurnStay operates as a licensed financial services provider in South Africa and is pursuing further licensing in international markets, as part of a broader push to formalise and de-risk cross-border travel payments for its merchants.
“The less merchants pay in fees, the more money stays in Africa,” says 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,” says 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.”
