Internet outage: Travel companies lost millions in 5days

Travel and tour companies lost millions of cedis in potential earnings due to the internet outages experienced in Ghana over five days.

Gideon Asare, CEO of Adanse Travels, and Frank Kwaku Annin-Bonsu, Acting President of the Ghana Association of Travel and Tour Agents confirmed to AviationGhana that they have lost millions in potential earnings because of their inability to access online ticketing portals during the period, “It grounded our operations as most of our activities are online. We had to resort to booking clients manually for our tours. For ticketing and hotels, it was not possible to do manual bookings. Some of our payments were not going through as banks too were facing similar issues.

We have various branches in the countries – Accra, Kumasi, and Takoradi, and so we tried to leverage on that. Sometimes a cellular network in Takoradi will be slightly better and then our staff there will do their best to work on request or sometimes Kumasi or Accra.

So we managed it that way but sometimes all branches were down. WiFi was not working at all so mostly were relying on cellular data,” Mr. Asare told AviationGhana.

We lost a big ticket deal of 20 passengers. They waited for some time and we couldn’t issue the tickets and eventually, they bought it in Abidjan. Also, there were scattered requests we couldn’t handle especially on ticketing. So we can say roughly GHC 500,000 -800,000 ticket sales volume.

“The Internet outages have affected travel and tour companies in diverse ways. Cancellation of reservations unattended to, and unable to make changes to other reservations, were some of the challenges we faced.

It was a big loss of revenue to the agency industry and disruption to our payments and accounts systems. We were managing requests manually and calling airlines directly if possible. Others fell on Airtel Tigo hotspots as substitutes although not very reliable We are yet to estimate the total cost of the internet outages but it’s in the millions,” Frank Kwaku Annin-Bonsu confirmed to AviationGhana. Four submarine telecommunications cables connecting African countries to Europe and other parts of the world went offline at about 12:30 on Thursday, 14 March 2024 — the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT–3 cables.

While the cause of the breaks remains to be confirmed, reports says that a preliminary analysis by submarine fibre cable operator MainOne indicates that seismic activity on the seabed caused its submarine fibre cable to break.