TurnStay, a South African fintech that provides payment infrastructure for African travel businesses, has processed more than R1 billion in transactions during the first six months of 2026, three years after its founding.
The company serves hotels, safari lodges, tour operators and villa agencies across Africa. Its payment model is designed to address the cost of processing payments from international travellers, which TurnStay says can be higher for African merchants than for businesses in other markets.
TurnStay raised a $300,000 pre-seed round in 2024 and a $2 million seed round in 2025. The company is now preparing for a Series A round to support its expansion across the continent.
For foreign travel bookings, traditional local payment processing can cost merchants as much as 8% of a transaction, according to TurnStay. Its clients pay from 1.6%, with the company attributing the difference to a merchant-of-record model combined with payment rails that include stablecoins for cross-border fund transfers.
“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.”
The merchant-of-record structure is intended to give African travel businesses access to payment infrastructure that is also used by global platforms. TurnStay says this allows smaller travel operators to use the model without having the scale of companies such as Airbnb.
The company operates as a licensed financial services provider in South Africa and is pursuing additional licensing in international markets. Its operations currently extend beyond South Africa into markets including Mauritius, Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana.
TurnStay's customer base includes travel businesses such as Singita, Safari.com, Londolozi and The Capital. The company says it remains focused on developing payment infrastructure for the African travel sector.
“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.”
The company says the lower transaction costs are also part of its broader approach to cross-border payments. “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.”
The latest transaction volume comes three years after TurnStay was founded, when the company began with two people. Its next funding round is expected to support its expansion across additional African markets.
