Skift Take
As travelers increasingly seek value without compromising on quality or experience, Africa’s biggest tourism opportunity may lie in building the reliable, professionally managed middle tier that much of the continent has historically lacked.
This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.
At a time of geopolitical uncertainty, rising costs, and ongoing travel disruptions, the global tourism outlook is anything but straightforward.
Demand remains resilient, but it is shifting. Skift Research found that 63% of travelers plan to increase travel spending over the next year, even as 39% actively use cost-saving strategies, highlighting a growing emphasis on value alongside continued demand. That shift is exposing a long-standing gap in the industry between budget and luxury — and creating a practical problem for anyone trying to send travelers to emerging markets at scale.
This “missing middle” is becoming a defining constraint on how and where travel can grow — and nowhere is that gap more visible than in Africa. The continent has long represented an obvious opportunity: demand is real, the exchange rate is favorable, and the experiences are genuinely differentiated. What has been harder to find is the trusted, professionally managed mid-market infrastructure that allows travelers, as well as the operators, investors, and institutional partners directing them, to engage with the continent reliably and with confidence.
Who Will Build the Middle?
While Africa’s hotel development pipeline reached 123,846 rooms as of early 2026, according to Lagos-based advisory firm W Hospitality Group, much of that growth remains concentrated in upscale and luxury segments, leaving a significant gap in professionally managed mid-market supply. Goldman Sachs South Africa Managing Director Wafeeq Pandey described the mid-market as “absolutely underpenetrated” at Skift’s Megatrends event in Cape Town, while other panelists pointed to air connectivity and visa regimes as persistent constraints on growth.
“The real opportunity lies in the underbuilt middle tier,” said Hamza Farooqui, founder and CEO of Millat Group, a Johannesburg-based private equity firm that invests across real estate, technology, and hospitality.
Capital has often flowed toward proven luxury assets, while fragmented ownership, inconsistent operating standards, infrastructure constraints, and complex intra-African travel have made it difficult to create trusted, scalable offerings across multiple markets. Much of the region’s hotel stock remains independently owned, limiting brand expansion and standardization across destinations.
Beyond Hotel Development
Together, those challenges have left Africa with a tourism ecosystem that remains difficult to navigate, where accommodations, transportation, distribution, and traveler services often operate in isolation rather than as part of a seamless journey.
In many cases, the obstacle has been less about demand than execution — creating products and systems that travelers and investors can trust. The continent does not simply need more hotel rooms. It needs better-connected tourism systems.
For years, much of the global narrative around African tourism has focused on luxury safaris, trophy assets, and frontier growth, as explored in prior Skift coverage. Farooqui believes the next phase of tourism growth will depend less on adding luxury inventory and more on repairing what he describes as a “broken architecture” — the disconnect between accommodations, transportation, distribution, and traveler services that make tourism difficult to scale across the continent.
The Problem Isn’t Demand
Africa’s growing middle class, improving air connectivity, and digitally connected younger travelers are creating new mobility patterns both within the continent and from overseas. Estimates of Africa’s middle class vary widely by definition, ranging from roughly 170 million to as many as 350 million people, the upper figure being the African Development Bank‘s widely cited benchmark. Meanwhile, the continent’s population has surpassed 1.5 billion, and with a median age under 20, it is creating a large, increasingly travel-oriented consumer base.
“You’ve always had a very robust and very strong middle class in Africa,” Farooqui said. “And the younger middle-income traveler in particular is becoming a growing market.”
That demand is emerging both within Africa and among a new generation of international visitors. Africa was the world’s fastest-growing tourism region in 2025, with international arrivals rising 8% to 81 million, underscoring the continent’s widening appeal.
The bigger challenge may be less about demand and more about building the connected, mid-market travel ecosystem to serve it — making destinations easier to discover, book, reach, and navigate across every stage of the journey.
Rethinking Discovery and Distribution
The changing traveler profile is also reshaping how travel decisions are made. Skift Research found that 63% of AI-aware travelers globally have already used generative tools to assist with trip planning, while 55% say they are not strictly brand-driven when choosing accommodations. As recommendation engines become a larger part of travel discovery, local independent hotels could gain visibility alongside established global brands. As outlined in Skift’s recent Megatrend, AI is creating a platform shift that could weaken the traditional advantage of OTAs and large hotel chains.
“This younger generation doesn’t want to walk into a lobby and feel like they’re back in New York City,” Farooqui said. “They want that localized experience.”
That creates an opportunity for African hospitality companies to compete on authenticity as much as scale.
“I think there’s a major white-space opportunity for an operator that combines the scale and sophistication of a global hotel brand with the authenticity of an independent African brand,” he said. “The winner will be whoever can deliver on technology, loyalty, demand generation, and localization at scale in the African middle market.”
Building Connected Journeys
If travelers are going to return to Africa, Farooqui argues, the industry needs to think beyond individual destinations and toward connected regional experiences.
“How do I easily add on a trip to Victoria Falls? How do I plan a train journey there?” he asked. “Africa as a whole needs to think like that.”
David Frost, CEO of the Southern Africa Tourism Services Association (SATSA), has made a similar argument about the role of the mid-market in driving geographic spread. “This is the segment that travels, that self-drives, that goes beyond Cape Town and Kruger,” Frost said, arguing that rebuilding the middle tier is critical to dispersing tourism spending beyond flagship destinations.
Farooqui points to luxury travel models as examples of how seamless multi-destination experiences can encourage travelers to stay longer and return. “Go look at how Four Seasons does the Four Seasons jet,” he said. “You travel around the world, and it’s seamless. Africa needs to think in that fashion.”
The Friction Between Destinations
Creating those kinds of journeys, however, requires overcoming significant barriers. Airlift is improving, and new corridors are opening, particularly between Africa and the Middle East, with service from carriers such as Emirates and Ethiopian Airlines. But connectivity alone is not enough.
“The movement is filled with friction,” Farooqui said. “Visa complexity, fragmented itineraries, inconsistent transportation systems, and uneven tourism infrastructure continue to limit how travelers move across the continent once they arrive.”
Those challenges persist despite growing demand. According to the African Development Bank’s African Visa Openness Index, African travelers still require visas before departure for 47% of intra-African journeys, underscoring the regulatory barriers that continue to constrain regional mobility.
The opportunity lies not only in attracting travelers to Africa, but in making it easier for them to move around once they arrive.
Developing Tourism Systems at Scale
Creating more connected journeys requires someone to own the customer experience. Travelers do not experience accommodations, transportation, excursions, and local services as separate products. They experience them as a single trip. Skift Research found that experiences increasingly shape the top of the travel funnel, acting as key drivers of destination discovery before travelers move into the booking stage.
Farooqui argues that the next generation of hospitality companies will need to think less like property owners and more like ecosystem builders, connecting accommodations, transportation, experiences, and local partners into a seamless journey.
At properties such as the Hyatt Regency Cape Town, Millat is already building networks of vetted tour operators and curated experiences.
“Most hotel brands don’t get that granular,” Farooqui said. “Very few operators think about how to curate the entire guest journey in a way that builds trust and creates a consistently reliable experience.”
In fragmented travel markets, trust becomes part of the product. The more complexity travelers encounter, the more valuable it becomes for operators to simplify decision-making and provide confidence throughout the journey.
Fixing the Architecture
For operators like Millat, the goal is not simply to fill hotel rooms. It is to build the kind of end-to-end infrastructure — vetted tour operators, curated ground-level experiences, connected regional itineraries — that allows institutional partners to send clients to Africa with confidence. The Hyatt Regency Cape Town model, where in-house capabilities cover everything from logistics to excursions, is a proof of concept for what that looks like at the property level. The next step is building it at a regional scale.
The winners in African tourism will not necessarily be those who build the most glamorous properties. They will be the operators who reduce friction, build trust, and make multi-destination African travel easier to buy and experience.
For travel program directors evaluating whether Africa belongs in their portfolio, that distinction matters now. The exchange rate advantage that makes luxury-quality experiences accessible at mid-market prices won’t last indefinitely. The air corridors are opening. The demand is there. What’s being built right now will determine which partners are ready to receive institutional demand when it arrives — and which aren’t.
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This sponsored content was created collaboratively by Millat Global and Skift Studio.