TurnStay, a South African payments company focused on the travel industry, has processed more than R1bn ($60.7m) in transactions in the first six months of 2026, a milestone that underscores growing demand for cheaper ways to move money across borders in Africa’s tourism sector.
The volume, achieved just three years after the business was founded, signals that travel merchants from luxury safari operators to villa agencies are willing to switch from established payment processors to a specialist platform that promises to cut their costs by more than half. The company, which counts Singita, Londolozi, Safari.com and The Capital among its clients, says its fee structure starts at 1.6 per cent of the transaction value, compared with rates of up to 8 per cent that African travel businesses often face when accepting international card payments through traditional local gateways.
“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 Alon Stern, chief executive 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.”
The savings are generated by a structure that combines a merchant-of-record framework with modern payment rails. TurnStay acts as the legal seller in a transaction, aggregating payments on behalf of multiple properties and tour operators, and then settles in local currency using stablecoins to move funds across borders quickly and at low cost. The approach borrows from the playbook of global platforms, but adapts it for standalone African travel businesses that lack the scale of an Airbnb or Booking.com.
“Global platforms have used this model for years,” Stern said. “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.”
The R1bn milestone is modest relative to global travel payment volumes, but it marks rapid expansion for a start-up that raised a $300,000 pre-seed round in 2024 and a $2mn seed round in 2025. TurnStay says it is now preparing a Series A capital raise to finance further expansion across the continent. Its base remains South Africa, with growing activity in Mauritius, Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana.
The company operates as a licensed financial services provider in South Africa and is pursuing additional licensing in international markets, an acknowledgement that its cross-border model, particularly the use of stablecoins, sits in a regulatory grey area in many jurisdictions. South African authorities have been tightening oversight of crypto assets, although stablecoins used as settlement instruments between businesses tend to attract less scrutiny than retail-facing tokens. TurnStay says its approach is designed to formalise and de-risk payment flows for merchants rather than circumvent regulation.
Africa’s travel sector has been a magnet for investor interest as tourism recovers strongly from the pandemic disruption, but the underlying payments infrastructure remains fragmented. Many small and mid-sized lodges and operators lack the bargaining power to negotiate lower processing fees with international card networks, and they often face slow settlement times and unfavourable currency conversion rates. TurnStay’s pitch — that lower fees mean more revenue stays in the local economy — has resonated with high-end operators for whom payments can represent a large fixed cost.
“The less merchants pay in fees, the more money stays in Africa,” Stern said. “The experiences African travel businesses offer are already world-class. We think the payment infrastructure behind them should be too.”
The company’s co-founders bring a blend of technical and entrepreneurial experience. Stern, a mathematician with a PhD from New York University and a postdoctoral stint at Princeton, previously co-founded Slide Financial and served as head of data at Prodigy Finance. James Hedley, the chief operating officer, co-founded the South African ticketing platform Quicket, which was acquired by Ticketmaster, and has spent more than 15 years in African travel, payments and commerce.
While TurnStay has carved out a niche in travel payments, it is not alone in trying to solve the continent’s cross-border payment frictions. Competitors include well-funded fintechs using blockchain-based settlement for remittances and business-to-business flows, as well as global gateways such as Stripe and PayPal that continue to expand their African footprints. TurnStay’s differentiator is its tight integration with hotel booking engines and property management systems, which makes it easier for travel merchants to adopt the platform without overhauling their existing technology.
Scalability will depend on navigating a patchwork of national regulations, managing currency volatility and building trust with regulators and bank partners across multiple markets. The planned Series A round, whose size has not been disclosed, will test whether venture investors see the travel payments niche as large enough to sustain a continental champion.
For now, the founders are focused on execution. “Three years ago there were two of us and an idea,” Stern said. “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.”