OMOLUA Nwoke is the Chief Operating Officer at Ajala.ng, an online travel booking portal. The firm is focused on catering for the exponential growth and de­mands of customers who desire personal, quick and unique travel management services and it’s one of the fastest growing agencies in the country. In this inter­view with Sunday Sun, she shared with us her secret for success, challenges of a growing business and even gave us five success tips on how to survive in this type of business. Excerpts:

You guys started not too long ago, how has it been so far?

Acceptance has been quite good and it has been growing steadily. It’s getting better ev­ery month. People have been giving us both good and critical feedback which we work on .

What are your major challenges?

One of our challenges is meeting people’s expectations. You see when people buy tickets from us, they automat­ically think we are the airline. Most of our common problems include satiating customer’s expectation when they are late for their flights and they come to us to automatically to fix it. Since they bought the tickets from us, they would want us to get them on the next flight without additional payment. Also, meeting the international expectation of the brand is our priority and so we have to manage the adverse effect of the fluctuating exchange rate of the dollar. Our third biggest problem I would say, is dealing with our staff strength and our growth. We are now recruit­ing faster than we had earlier thought and that requires a lot of funding too.

So, how have you been tackling these problems?

It’s really been hard with our pricing and so we’ve been try­ing to make things affordable for our customers. What we did was that we decided to think out of the box to proffer solu­tions to these issues. We have thought of how to deal with our foreign partners because that is where the major prob­lem originates. For instance, working with different partners like hotels, I have to pay them at a certain rate. So, how do I get that done? We need to try and get a balanced way of remitting payments. We have been working with everybody to get the work done. We have solutions providers who help in paying our customers at the exchange rate and it’s not as much as it was. Apart from that, we also have to source solutions locally. For instance, let’s say Hilton Hotel has a hotel in Nigeria or outside Nigeria and I need to get to one of them, I would go through the one in Nigeria and settle things with them first and among the three of us we work out something. You see, thinking out of the box has helped a great deal, like it has helped us to get our forex at reasonable rates.

What makes your brand different?

Our philosophy here is that we make you feel like we’ve known each other for a while. For instance, if you need a ticket to Houston, what a nonattached agent does is to ask for the price, get you a ticket and make the transfer. But we go a step further, we become conversational and ask you questions like why do you want to go to Houston? Why do you want a one-way ticket? Your answer might be, “I am going to school and I am not sure if am coming back”. We won’t stop there, we probe further and ask you your visa category. You know we could as well give you tickets and when you run into trouble you come get another ticket and that is more money for us.

But no, we don’t approach customers from that end but as friends. You see with every agent you are talking to at Aja­la.ng, we make you feel like you are talking to someone who’s looking out for you be­cause basically that’s what we do. We make sure you don’t get stranded when you are out there. We give you emergency numbers in case you travel out and there is a problem.

We try to provide something for everybody, so we have local, regional and international packages. If you want to go to Accra, we must know your budget and work accordingly. We have valentine packages especially for those who don’t want to leave Nigeria, which is quite affordable too.

How profitable is this business?

Thank goodness we’re pas­sionate about the business, but it’s not easy and that’s the hon­est fact. The margins are quite slim and for you to be quite profitable in this business, you have to deal with volume i.e you need a large clientele.