See Our Story Through Dominic Temple's Eyes
"I was living in Kaduna when I first heard about Hotels.ng. Those days, I ran a small travels and tours consultancy and Facebook was still the thing. It was during one of those days spent scrolling through my Facebook feed that I ran into news of Hotels.ng and Mark Essien. I remember reading the piece and thinking "wow wow, this is amazing!"
I found Mark on Facebook and sent him a message, two days later, to talk about his new startup. We quickly moved to talking on the phone. Mark was quite open and honest about the steps he was taking and the challenges he faced while building a startup in Nigeria. His enthusiasm was genuine, but still, the doubts lingered: was the market ready? Would hotels be open to the idea of paying for a service that helped them get bookings from the internet? It was hard and brutal, but slowly and surely, he was making progress and the number of hotels on the service kept growing.
Fast forward to a few months later, in 2013, when Mark told me he’d found funding from what I later learnt to be Spark.ng and he was looking to grow his service faster. He asked if I could help sign hotels in Kaduna then, to the service. It sounded like an interesting project so I agreed. I would visit hotels in and around Kaduna metropolis and introduce the service to them. I found that I didn’t have a lot of convincing to do: hotels even in the so-called backward northern region of Nigeria were open to the idea of making more money through reservations from the internet. What we offered then, was the opportunity for small hotels to experience the impact of putting their businesses online, without having to commit huge financial resources to make this possible. I went from scanning hotel brochures and posters containing contact and address information of the hotels, to taking photographs of the rooms and facilities the hotels had on offer.
Eventually, I moved to Taraba and Adamawa to do the same thing. I would visit these states for weeks and spend time talking to hotel managers and introducing our service to them. I was doing well, but Mark wanted things to be done faster. That was when I engaged three reliable guys I knew then and together, we scoured the states in the North, taking photographs of hotels and building relationships with the hotel owners.
The danger of experiencing a terrorist attack was ever so real in those days. Embassies were issuing travel advisories warning their citizens to stay away from states in the Northern region of Nigeria and Boko Haram was waging a war against the citizens and institutions of the Nigerian state. I had a job to do though and life had to go on, so I kept travelling to the hot spots to sign up hotels. Once in Kano, I almost got caught up in a bomb blast. I had just left the building and moved to my hotel a few minutes before the bomb went off. I had gone to buy some personal items and when the blast occurred. I sat in my room thinking that could have been me. Another time in Taraba, I was planning to go to a town called Wukari to scout for hotels there. I had just arrived in Taraba that day, in Jalingo, and thought it was a good idea to begin with the hotels in Jalingo before I’d leave to Wukari the next day. I went to Taraba State Hotel and while waiting to speak with the manager, I noticed he had this weary look on his face while he spoke on the phone. Apparently, people were getting pulled from cabs and killed by mobs on the Jalingo-Wukari Road. There was an ethnic crisis brewing and I had just escaped possible lynching because I had, on a hunch, decided not to visit Wukari that day, but the next.
[caption id="attachment_787" align="aligncenter" width="724"]
Dominic Temple.[/caption]
Another time, my small three-man team was attacked and robbed in Nasarawa. Phones, cameras and money the company had sent down from Lagos were stolen from them, and they were physically hurt. They took out time to recover and in no time, were back to signing up more hotels and earning the money we paid them. I guess it’s true what they say about being able to find a way, if you really want to get things done.
Moving to Lagos
I moved to Lagos last year to take up a permanent role at Hotels.ng. I have worked in personnel management, customer relationships management, bookings and now, I work to maintain and grow our relationships with our corporate clients. It has been a challenging switch, moving from the streets to the office, but it has been very rewarding. Working with Mark means you need to think for yourself, and earn your pay and is possibly the best education in being proactive and taking initiative.
My proudest moments are when work means I need to revisit some of the hotels I personally signed up to our service. We had to claim commissions from a hotel in Yola recently and I remember feeling so proud because I’d signed that hotel up to our service back then.
Would I do it all over again? Yes, I would. In Lagos, I dodge traffic instead of bullets and bombs, but the lessons in persistence, grit and boldness gleaned from the time I spent getting stuff done in spite of the prevailing atmosphere of danger around me has been invaluable."
Bio: Dominic Temple works to sustain corporate relationships at Hotels.ng
Fast forward to a few months later, in 2013, when Mark told me he’d found funding from what I later learnt to be Spark.ng and he was looking to grow his service faster. He asked if I could help sign hotels in Kaduna then, to the service. It sounded like an interesting project so I agreed. I would visit hotels in and around Kaduna metropolis and introduce the service to them. I found that I didn’t have a lot of convincing to do: hotels even in the so-called backward northern region of Nigeria were open to the idea of making more money through reservations from the internet. What we offered then, was the opportunity for small hotels to experience the impact of putting their businesses online, without having to commit huge financial resources to make this possible. I went from scanning hotel brochures and posters containing contact and address information of the hotels, to taking photographs of the rooms and facilities the hotels had on offer.
Eventually, I moved to Taraba and Adamawa to do the same thing. I would visit these states for weeks and spend time talking to hotel managers and introducing our service to them. I was doing well, but Mark wanted things to be done faster. That was when I engaged three reliable guys I knew then and together, we scoured the states in the North, taking photographs of hotels and building relationships with the hotel owners.
The danger of experiencing a terrorist attack was ever so real in those days. Embassies were issuing travel advisories warning their citizens to stay away from states in the Northern region of Nigeria and Boko Haram was waging a war against the citizens and institutions of the Nigerian state. I had a job to do though and life had to go on, so I kept travelling to the hot spots to sign up hotels. Once in Kano, I almost got caught up in a bomb blast. I had just left the building and moved to my hotel a few minutes before the bomb went off. I had gone to buy some personal items and when the blast occurred. I sat in my room thinking that could have been me. Another time in Taraba, I was planning to go to a town called Wukari to scout for hotels there. I had just arrived in Taraba that day, in Jalingo, and thought it was a good idea to begin with the hotels in Jalingo before I’d leave to Wukari the next day. I went to Taraba State Hotel and while waiting to speak with the manager, I noticed he had this weary look on his face while he spoke on the phone. Apparently, people were getting pulled from cabs and killed by mobs on the Jalingo-Wukari Road. There was an ethnic crisis brewing and I had just escaped possible lynching because I had, on a hunch, decided not to visit Wukari that day, but the next.
[caption id="attachment_787" align="aligncenter" width="724"] Dominic Temple.[/caption]
Another time, my small three-man team was attacked and robbed in Nasarawa. Phones, cameras and money the company had sent down from Lagos were stolen from them, and they were physically hurt. They took out time to recover and in no time, were back to signing up more hotels and earning the money we paid them. I guess it’s true what they say about being able to find a way, if you really want to get things done.
Moving to Lagos
I moved to Lagos last year to take up a permanent role at Hotels.ng. I have worked in personnel management, customer relationships management, bookings and now, I work to maintain and grow our relationships with our corporate clients. It has been a challenging switch, moving from the streets to the office, but it has been very rewarding. Working with Mark means you need to think for yourself, and earn your pay and is possibly the best education in being proactive and taking initiative.
My proudest moments are when work means I need to revisit some of the hotels I personally signed up to our service. We had to claim commissions from a hotel in Yola recently and I remember feeling so proud because I’d signed that hotel up to our service back then.
Would I do it all over again? Yes, I would. In Lagos, I dodge traffic instead of bullets and bombs, but the lessons in persistence, grit and boldness gleaned from the time I spent getting stuff done in spite of the prevailing atmosphere of danger around me has been invaluable."
Bio: Dominic Temple works to sustain corporate relationships at Hotels.ng
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