Travelstart, Egypt’s leading online travel agency, has added a new PayFort pay@store feature to its list of payment options, making payment for bookings much easier for its unbanked customers.

Based in Dubai, PayFort is a leading online payment gateway delivering a complete suite of payment solutions that are tailored to Arab online buying habits and trends. With the pay@store option, customers wishing to pay cash are free from the constraints of paying during Travelstart and bank operating hours. They can now pay at one of the 50,000 points of sale (POS), 6,200 ATMs, and 1,300 post office branches that comprise the nationwide Fawry network.

“When you couple the Egyptian population’s reliance on cash-based transactions with its large pool of internet users and propensity to book travel online, it becomes clear that adding the pay@store feature to our list of payment options was a necessary one, and one that is in line with our strategic vision of making booking travel online as simple, flexible, and convenient as possible,” said Ahmed Saad, country manager of Travelstart Egypt.

The Egyptian market is ideally suited for pay@store, given that only nine percent of its population has bank accounts — a figure that is half of the Arab world average of 18 per cent. Despite its low rate of banked citizens, Egypt has approximately 38 million internet users, around 40 per cent of the population. In 2013, Egypt recorded $6 billion in online ticketing, about 12 per cent of the region’s total market. On average, 9 per cent of hotel bookings made in Egypt are conducted online.

The pay@store feature is simple to use: Travelstart customers select the pay@store option during the payment segment of the online booking process, after which they will receive a payment voucher, which they then use to pay for the booking at a Fawry network location.

Travelstart is the first fully integrated online travel agency in Egypt and offers users simplicity, choice and flexibility to customise their travel itinerary. Customers can find out more at www.travelstart.com.eg. – TradeArabia News Service