20 Years. One Mission: Making Nigeria's Travel Trade Unstoppable
20 Years. One Mission: Making Nigeria's Travel Trade
Unstoppable
By Temilade Adu
Nigeria's travel sector moves millions of passengers
annually, but the infrastructure holding it together is often invisible,
underfunded, and misunderstood. The gap between demand and capacity has a cost.
For twenty years, Finchglow Travels has been absorbing
it, pricing the fares that travel agents quote, shouldering the foreign
exchange volatility that would otherwise ground small agencies, and negotiating
with airlines on behalf of an industry too fragmented to negotiate for itself.
This year, Finchglow Travels marks its 20th anniversary
not with fanfare for its own sake, but as a moment to hold a mirror up to an
ecosystem it has quietly held together, and to name, plainly, what a travel
consolidator is and why Nigeria cannot afford to keep misunderstanding one.
In global aviation markets, consolidators are well
understood. They sit between airlines and the travel trade, aggregating
inventory, negotiating contracted fares unavailable on the open market, and
providing the financial and operational scaffolding that allows thousands of
independent travel agents to compete. In Nigeria, that understanding has never
quite taken root. The result is a structural vulnerability that the sector has
only recently begun to acknowledge.
Finchglow Travel’s Managing Director, Ezekiel Ikotun, is
direct about what that gap costs and what closing it requires.
“Our goal is to educate our customers, equip them with
the right knowledge, and make them global players. We don't just sell tickets,
we consolidate travel into opportunity, savings, and innovation.”
Finchglow's 20-year journey is the story of building that
infrastructure almost entirely without a template in a market where airlines,
agents, and corporates each operated in silos, where forex policy could reprice
a ticket overnight, and where the knowledge needed to run a sustainable travel
business was neither documented nor distributed.
Today, the company powers travel for corporate organisations,
retail travel agents, and consumers across Nigeria and beyond. Airlines trust
it as a settlement partner. Agents rely on it for access to fares, systems, and
support they cannot access alone. Corporates use it to manage complex travel
programmes in a market where complexity is the norm.
The 20th anniversary arrives at a turbulent moment for
Nigerian aviation. Foreign exchange instability has made airline pricing
volatile and settlement uncertain. The margins in travel remain razor-thin.
Agents face staffing constraints, limited access to working capital, and
widening gaps in digital capability. International airlines continue to weigh
Nigeria's operating environment against their global route priorities.
Group Managing Director, Finchglow Holdings, Bankole
Bernard, reiterates this:
“Airlines are protecting themselves against instability
and uncertainty. Broader foreign exchange and policy challenges largely drive
fare volatility and most people operating in this sector are one bad quarter
away from finding that out.”
Finchglow's response to these pressures has been structural, not
reactive. By leveraging dollar inflows from its corporate client base and
negotiating dual-currency settlement arrangements with airline partners, the
company has created a buffer that extends beyond itself, allowing agents in its
network to transact in naira while Finchglow manages the underlying dollar
obligations. In a market where forex exposure has collapsed more than one
travel business, this is not a small thing.
The company has also invested in building capacity across the
sector. Finchglow hosts webinars and live events, publishes weekly industry
intelligence, and runs online training designed to narrow the knowledge gap
that makes Nigerian travel agents vulnerable. Three live editions ran in 2025
alone, with plans to deepen the programme's reach across more cities in 2026.
In Nigerian business, longevity in a volatile sector is not
incidental; it is evidence of adaptation, of relationships that held, of a
business model that remained relevant through deregulation, a pandemic, and a
currency crisis that reshaped the economics of international travel for agents
across the country.
Finchglow Holdings Group Managing Director, Bankole Bernard, has
consistently called for greater government engagement on regulatory
inconsistencies and increased domestic investment in aviation infrastructure,
including Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul facilities, to reduce the capital
flight that continues to weaken Nigeria's position in regional aviation. These
are not peripheral concerns. They are structural conditions that determine
whether Nigerian travel businesses thrive or merely survive.
That Finchglow has done more than survive and has brought a
significant portion of Nigeria's travel trade with it is what the 20th
anniversary is really marking.
As Nigeria's travel ecosystem continues to navigate structural
headwinds, Finchglow enters its third decade with the same posture it has held
for twenty years: in the background, holding the infrastructure together, and
insisting that an informed, well-resourced travel trade is not a luxury it is
the foundation on which the entire sector stands.
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