It is completely free to sign up as a partner- we accept hotels, tour operators, charter airlines of any size as well that provide services in Tanzania. There are 3 steps to the process, first the basic signup where you enter your basic information, then more advanced signup you enter more detailed information about what travel services you have, where you are located. And final step where you enter business information including agreeing to basic commission structures.
After agreeing commission structures with us for your services we can set these and begin making you active on the system for our October launch- more details on specifics will be made available soon when we launch inc. a tutorial on how to use the services such as setting prices, availability etc…
All commissions are negotiable depending on the type of service you provide- but on average we plan to take 10-20% commission on bookings which will include all fees related to credit card and mobile payment bookings that we incur on the platform. Each service provider will be required to sign a commission agreement as part of their signup with us that covers the forthcoming season and that can be renogiated in future based on volume of bookings.
Our Commission structure for 2011 is viewed here:
YM Commission Pricing List Jan2011
Yes- your website can be linked on your profile. The benefit of having a Yellow Masai profile is the marketing exposure that we plan to provide to up to 1M visitors of the site in our first year- we are marketing the Tanzania region.
Another benefit is that you can participate in exciting packages that span, flights, transfers, hotels across the country since rarely do tourists plan to stay solely with you or but will have onward journey to other parts of East Africa.
If you do not have a booking engine that handles reservations and online electronic payments inc. credit cards and mobile banking (used with anyone with a mobile phone) this allows more travellers to book on our platform than any ever created in Africa. Furthermore you can customize and embed our booking engine onto your website just like embedding youtube videos in a blog or webpage, allowing you to take advantage of our powerful booking platform whilst retaining your website use for all your visitors who might not necessarily visit Yellow Masai.
Yellow Masai is exclusively focused on Tanzania and the East Africa region- hence we will have the most listings of hotels, tour operators and domestic airlines and charter services.. Yellow Masai does not yet let you book international flights into the region but plans to in future. Our platform is also built to adapt to the needs of service providers large and small and to work with emerging east Africa payment platforms such as M-Pesa mobile banking that is used with over half of adults in Kenya or over 10 million users.
Our platform is also build to directly integrate with social media outlets such as facebook and twitter enabling our partners to connect with next generation of internet users. It is also multilingual website further helping to expand our reach.
We take our members and partner data privacy very seriously and will not use or disclose it to any other 3rd party- the data may be used to customize experiences for the users such as targeted travel deals and relevant newsletters should you opt in. More information can be found at our constantly updated and revised website- http://www.yellowmasai.com/eng/privacypolicy
Yes, you can advertise on Yellow Masai we will offer competitive rates dependend on your needs- in the meantime, you can e-mail for enquires info@yellowmasai.com
We plan to the leading destination travel portal in East Africa catering to a broad set of travellers who are plan to travel for business or tourism. We will market Yellow Masai globally in the main travel markets of USA, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Australia as well as domestically inc. Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda as well as Tanzania. The site will be customized and offer different payment methods and deals dependent on the market and language set up.
You can sign up on our website here- http://www.yellowmasai.com/eng/partner-signup
The process has a basic form to quickly get going and receive username and password and then one can complete the rest of their profile online at any time which includes entering more business information and signing our online commission agreement.
Members of the site are regular visitors of the site who are interested in staying connected with us to get travel deals wherever they may be. Members can sign up with the facebook credentials and also become a facebook fan/like of our site to keep updated as well as follow us on twitter @Yellowmasai
Yes, we allow any business to register themselves as hotel, tour operator, flight or ferry service and it is not limited to just one- once the provider is signed up they can manage all types of booking from one dashboard place with their username and password.
It is highly recommended that you get a mobile banking business/merchant account with any of the 4 networks (M-Pesa, Tigo-Pesa, Zain ZAP, Z-Pesa). This allows Yellow Masai to securely transfer funds directly your mobile account wallet which can then be withdrawn from any mobile agent. Given the reach of mobile agents across the region more than banks, it will provide your business with more ways to get access to your money faster and more reliably over a traditional bank. Customers can already pay for services like TV and electric utilities by mobile payments, Yellow Masai will be the first to website to integrate mobile banking.
Your booking information is only visible to you on our secure platform and the administrative staff at Yellow Masai who will be on hand to help you with any problems.
You can logon via your mobile phone’s web browser but we are working on integrating sms access for both our partners to get updated on bookings and for our travellers they can get sms based receipts of booking confirmation as well as query on availability of service directly by partners- we plan to implement this by the end of 2010- we plan to provide these services for a modest fee.
Yes it will possible to review and moderate any inappropriate comments made under your profile by users- we aim to help our partners succeed in providing reliable and trustworthy services, so we hope providers will see this as an opportunity to take feedback from community and help improve their customer service.
Partners are notified of bookings by e-mail and they can manage them (accept, adjust etc…) on our web platform. We are planning to provide SMS updates of bookings (for a fee) by the end of the year when we rollout our mobile sms services.
The payout will depend on factors that including your cancellation and deposit policy that you provide to us when you sign up. But generally we plan to pay out partners within 30 days before the booking and longer dependent on how far in advance of service delivery date. Domestic bookings made via mobile banking will happen a lot faster.