How Tripco reduced time-to-payment by a full day with Stitch automated payouts
Tripco supports a portfolio of localised travel booking platforms that are loved by millions of South Africans – including LekkeSlaap, TravelGround, and most recently, Viya. Created by South Africans for South Africans, Tripco’s goal is to be the online travel agency for the local market.
Launched with the TravelGround brand in 2009, today Tripco facilitates thousands of online accommodation bookings each month, with a portfolio of more than 27,000 collective properties. They’ve facilitated over R1 billion in local accommodation bookings over the last 12 months alone, and have served more than 6.6 million guests. Tripco has spent the last 14 years playing a crucial part in shaping the local travel market into what it is today — a sector responsible for nearly 4% of South Africa’s GDP.
Tripco sets itself apart with its extreme focus on customer experience. Customers that book on any of their platforms are guaranteed a connection with a human - including a name, a face and an email - that is always there to support them throughout the process.
We spoke with Tripco CFO Frans Joubert, who confirmed their dedication to hands-on customer support is something that will never change. “Our USP will always be customer service - we’ve got a fantastic customer support team and call centre,” Frans said. “I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of this - that’s what will distinguish us from competitors. While others are moving toward automation and AI chatbots, we’ll look to use tech to assist our customer service agents and help them provide better service.”
As Tripco continued to grow, however, and they found increasing demand for last-minute bookings and faster time-to-payment from property owners, they faced one particular challenge when it came to automating timely payouts.
Enter Stitch.
How money moves for Tripco: the challenge with manual payouts
One unique decision the Tripco team made early on was that almost all of their systems are custom-built and managed in-house - from their CRM to their accounting system. While for the most part that’s served them well, manual processes became challenging when it came to paying out booking fees to their property owners.
Increasingly, property owners are demanding faster payouts. “The biggest demand from property owners is to get the payments as quickly as possible. This has created problems for us in the past,” Frans shared. With frequent last-minute booking, particularly around holiday season, this creates an issue for Tripco as they want to ensure customer bookings aren’t disrupted due to payment delays.
“Timing is of critical importance. Any time savings we can get in terms of recognising the payment on our side, allocating it to the right booking and of course processing and paying it out correctly to the right property is super important. The quicker we are able to distribute the money the better.”
Previously, the Tripco team managed all payouts to property owners manually, in-house. Their accounts team had to, on a daily basis, pull bank statements from across multiple banks, upload these into their system, perform reconciliation across all banks and providers, then manually create a payment file and upload it back into their bank before they could process payouts.
“Our system would generate SSVS files, and those had to be uploaded again into the banking environment to process the payouts. The process also entailed updating and maintaining each individual property’s banking details manually as well. From a time and controls perspective, none of this was ideal,” Frans said.
Stitch teams up with Tripco to provide automated payouts over API, reducing time to payment
The Tripco team chose Stitch as one of its first third-party providers. They integrated Stitch to automate payouts to property owners 3x per week and reduce the time and effort required from their internal accounts team. It also significantly reduced the time it took for payments to reach property owners, allowing them to get paid sooner.
“In some instances, we’re saving two full business days in terms of the process with Stitch,” Frans said.
The other important metric for the Tripco team is time saved on the admin side. As a team that values customer support and added value for their clients, any time the team spends performing admin work is time that could be diverted toward more customer-centric tasks that add value. “I would say since integrating Stitch, almost a full person’s resources are now freed up to focus on other things. We can count the number of hours they had to spend manually uploading bank statements, checking bank details, doing manual checks, etc. That’s all hours saved in that process.”
“After we implemented Stitch, the system we’ve built around the API allows us to do the payouts with a single click of a button. We’re also able to do a lot of additional checks and controls automatically on payouts, which we were never able to do before. It’s way more reliable and efficient - overall a way better approach,” Frans said.
Frans also highlighted the significant support his team has received from Stitch - from onboarding and integration to today. “We’ve had a great experience working with the Stitch team. We could communicate quickly and efficiently over Slack, which was super useful. The response time was fantastic, and whenever we had issues, the team really jumped on it and solved it for us as quickly as possible.”
There was one particular incident that still stands out for Frans. “I’ll never forget this one incident. December is our busiest time because that’s when we have most of our check-ins during the holiday period. On Christmas Eve, we were experiencing some issues. I had to jump in - I reached out and made contact with the Stitch team, and literally on Christmas Eve, the guys from Stitch came online to assist and investigate, and we were able to solve the issues. It goes to show the support and the lengths the team was willing to go through - even on Christmas Eve.”
Creating lasting impact for the South African economy
The Tripco team’s vision is to be the leading local accommodation provider in South Africa - both to make travel easier and more enjoyable for consumers and to create an impact for property owners, many of whom are able to generate substantial income from renting out their properties.
“We see it making a massive difference for property owners,” Frans said. “The average property makes more than R54k per year from Tripco alone. As a secondary income stream, that goes a long way. We deal with a wide range of properties, from small guest houses to big hotels - we cater for everyone. Roughly 80% of our properties are small businesses.”
Tripco has the most wide-reaching inventory on the market. Since its launch in 2013, LekkeSlaap alone has earned properties more than R5 billion. They’re also particularly excited about their newest venture, Viya. “As part of our vision to be South Africa’s go-to OTA, we’ve recently launched Viya, Mzansi’s one-of-a-kind accommodation booking app. Viya taps into an underserved market and targets a unique audience: young, successful, black South Africans who are passionate about local travel.”
The firm is one of the largest contributors to local travel bookings and employs more than 140 staff, of which 78% are women (supplied by Tripco). It also generates bookings for accommodation businesses across the country, resulting in a ripple effect across other industries that rely on tourism, making it a direct contributor to job creation even outside of the firm itself.
