Yamsafer

» see yamsafer.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Yamsafer was a hotel booking site run out of Ramallah, which is a sentence that does most of the work by itself. Faris Zaher founded it in 2011 with Sameh Alfar and Seri Abdelhadi, selling rooms across the Middle East and eventually everywhere else. It ran a telephone call center alongside the website, because a meaningful share of its customers preferred to speak to somebody.

TechCrunch described it as the Booking.com of the Middle East, which undersells the harder part of the job. Booking.com inherited a continent full of hotels that already had online inventory systems. Yamsafer was signing up guesthouses and small hotels in the region that had never been listed anywhere, and putting them in front of international travelers for the first time.

It became the first Palestinian company to raise early-stage venture capital at all, which is a statistic about the market more than about the company. There was no local template for what it was doing, financially or operationally, and the funding rounds it closed are recorded as firsts rather than as amounts.

In 2016 it added Yamsafer Homes for vacation rentals. In October 2018 Forbes put it fifth in a list of twelve up-and-coming companies in the Middle East, judged on business model and on growth delivered to investors. Seventeen months later the borders closed.

~ the record ~

~ no card required ~

In January 2014 Yamsafer introduced Cardless Bookings, and claimed to be the first in the travel industry anywhere to do it. You could hold or confirm a hotel reservation without entering a credit card, and pay when you arrived. The deposit a hotel would normally demand up front was removed from the transaction entirely.

The reason for it is visible from Ramallah and invisible from Amsterdam. Credit card penetration across the MENA countries was far below the rates in the markets online travel had been built for, so the standard checkout flow was excluding people who had the money and wanted the room. Cardless Bookings launched in Amman, Madaba, Aqaba, the Dead Sea, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Cairo, Jeddah, Kuwait City and Manama.

~ the money ~

Wamda named it the best e-commerce startup in the region in its Best MENA Startups of 2011 competition, in January of the year it was founded. In June 2015 it closed a $3.5 million Series B led by Global Founders Capital with Sadara Ventures participating, which was both the largest venture round ever raised by a company based in Palestine and the first one led from outside the country.

Totals after that get murky depending on who is counting. Tracxn records $4.5 million across two rounds; other write-ups put lifetime funding above ten million dollars. No source reconciles the two figures, and there is no company left to ask.

~ the last page the archive kept ~

In March 2020 Yamsafer told its customers to avoid nonessential travel, stopped its marketing, offered cancellation cover on anything booked before 30 April, and absorbed the penalty itself when a hotel or an airline refused to waive one. A booking company telling people not to book, and then paying their cancellation fees out of its own account, has already decided which side of the ledger it wants to be on.

The Internet Archive holds a complete copy of the homepage from 1 November 2020, a hundred and ten kilobytes of working site. Among the destination tiles on it are Istanbul and Antalya, which is the closest this company ever came to me: it was selling my country to its travelers while I had never heard its name. After that capture there is nothing at all, no farewell page and no redirect, only a gap until October 2022 when the domain answers empty. It serves a parking lander today.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »