For many, travel is leisure–beautiful blue seas, tourist attractions and Instagram-worthy photos come to mind. But for Funmi Oyatogun, founder of TVP Adventures, travelling or organising fulfilling adventures for Africans is more than leisure. It is painstaking planning, detailed spreadsheets, and damage control. It is business.

As a trained geographer and environmentalist, travel was always going to be in the picture for Funmi Oyatogun, regardless of what career path she walked–and it was. As she travelled around the world, Oyatogun documented and told food stories on a now-defunct blog she called The Village Pot. Her entries included stories about finding a “pasta haven” in Venice and Rome, exploring Carnivore dining in Nairobi, and an unforgettable breakfast of Irish potato in Northern Ireland. The blog also featured guest posts from Nigerians who were travelling and exploring foreign cuisine on their own: musings about a seafood soiree in Gothenburg, and food adventures from Singapore and Japan. While the early days remain a memorable experience for Oyatogun; what she didn’t anticipate was the requests that soon followed. People wanted help and information to visit the places she had told stories about on the blog. And gradually, a business emerged. Not wanting to begin creating a completely different brand, she simply called it TVP Adventures. “It stands for whatever you want it to stand for,” Oyatogun says with a chuckle. “I don’t know that it has a [specific] meaning now.”

Since 2016, TVP Adventures has organised group, private and corporate trips around the world with a majority of them focused on the continent and Nigeria in particular. At the core of the business is the desire to simplify travel and make the experience as easy and enriching as possible. This includes the need to promote cross-cultural dialogue and a passion for designing community-building and learning experiences for people wherever they may be. Today, when you plan a trip with TVP Adventures, everything from your visa to transport, accommodation and itinerary are taken care of by Oyatogun and her team. 

Oyatogun describes herself as an accidental entrepreneur. “I wasn’t prepared for business,” she says frankly. “But once I realised I had a business to run, I began to equip myself.” For the first few months, she bootstrapped operations at TVP Adventures, and it would take some time before the business found its feet. “The good thing is travels and tours are not capital intensive,” she adds. It also took some time before it started to generate revenue but the need that she saw the business filling was too enormous to crumble under the challenges of those early months.

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Exploring local tourism in Nigeria

The continent is a richly diverse place with as many cultures, languages and people as humanly possible. In Nigeria alone, there are over 500 languages belonging to about 300 ethnic groups, all with distinct cultures and practices. From books to film to music to cultural festivals like the Osun Festival in the West, Durbars in the North or New Yam Festivals in the East, there is no shortage of attractions for visitors or locals to explore. Given its geography, the potential for local tourism within the country is immense. “When it comes to Nigeria, I’m one of those people who believes in the tourism potential that we have in this country,” says Oyatogun.

Yet, over the years, the country has failed to actualise the promise of its tourism sector or benefit from it. In the World Economic Forum’s 2019 Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report, Nigeria ranked poorly across a number of parameters including policy and enabling conditions (125th out of 140), prioritisation of travel and tourism (128th), and tourist service infrastructure (119th). It only fared slightly better in price competitiveness (69th) and environmental sustainability (74th) amongst a very few others. What is most troubling however, is the security and safety parameter, where Nigeria comes only after El Salvador and before Yemen, a country that has been devastated by war and is undergoing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. 

Oyatogun says it is critical to understand the two sides of the coin that is security. On one side you have the insecurity challenges facing the country; on the other are the perceptions by locals and potential visitors. If a place is in fact safe, but is perceived to be unsafe, tourism will suffer in the same way as a place that is unsafe and is perceived to be safe. Oyatogun and her team also face issues around education and battling misconceptions about security around the country. “People typically think about Nigeria in two parts; the north as this unstable and unsafe place where people are running around with bombs and the south as all roses,” she says. Oyatogun adds that in spite of travel advisories that end up painting the entire country as unsafe, due to localised security issues, safety and security is just as much a global issue regardless of where one takes a trip to. “You have to take safety precautions wherever you go, be it Lagos, Delhi, New York, London, Paris.”

Travelling in Africa as an African

You’ve heard it being said that to travel the continent with a non-African passport can be significantly less exhausting than travelling the continent with an African passport. This is true. But access is not the only challenge. Costs can be a significant hurdle to surmount for Africans who dream of touring their neighbouring locations. “People are not going to explore the continent for emotional reasons,” Oyatogun explains. “It has to be comparable to, or easier than Dubai that’s staring them in the face.” She argues that the hurdles for Africans travelling the continent have significantly decreased over the years through the advocacy and activities of brands like TVP Adventures, but there’s still so much work to be done. With the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) now in business and the Africa Union passport still in the works, Oyatogun says she is cautiously optimistic about the workings of the latter including what the strength of the passport may look like across nationalities and how visa regimes will evolve. “On the continent, we are very, very good at making policies,” she says. “We have so many good policies on paper.”

“Fill in the Black”

The global travel and tourism industry was one of the worst hit during the pandemic. Halfway into 2021, it is still in recovery, particularly in areas where lockdown measures and travel restrictions have been most rigid. TVP Adventures had designed an exciting and profitable 2020 for itself, but when the pandemic hit, things took on a doubtful turn for Oyatogun and her team. However, this did not last long. “We took a few weeks to just lament and it was very helpful,” she says.

In line with TVP Adventures’ mission to help people bond and learn, Oyatogun and her team began toying with the idea of a game that would allow people to explore the world, without having to pack a bag. It was during this same period that the death of George Floyd in the US, led to one of the most racially-charged awakenings in recent history, with the global re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. “With all the conversations that happened, we said to ourselves, what was missing in all these conversations was the commonality among different Black groups,” says Oyatogun. “That’s how the game was born.” Fill in the Black is a card game of charades celebrating Blackness, and Oyatogun says she is quite impressed with how people have welcomed it. Consequently, a digital version is in the works as are other game ideas that she is developing with her team to encourage fun learning and community bonding.

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The path less travelled

In an increasingly competitive industry, Oyatogun says her focus remains on what makes TVP Adventures stand out. For her, it’s daring to go where no one or very few have gone and taking willing explorers with her.

Most recently, Oyatogun went on an expedition to the highest point in Nigeria, Mt. Chappal Wadi, which she considers an addition to a list of famous mountain expeditions like Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt Kenya. An extremely detailed planner, Oyatogun explains the toughest challenge for the expedition was access to the location and sparse information due to the fact that everyone along the value chain worked in silos. Having conquered the summit, leaving an emblematic signpost for future explorers, Oyatogun has also brought together all the information from that expedition to make the voyage easier for subsequent explorers.

Putting together the moving parts of a trip and absorbing the difficulties and stress for her clients can be tasking. Once, just before a group of children were to take off to Nairobi, she was informed accommodation plans she had made months prior were cancelled and had to find alternatives while allaying fears from school administrators and parents. Another time, Dubai flights for clients had been cancelled and she had just 48hours to make another booking. Money was lost on that trip, she says, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.

While she travels on her own for leisure, regardless of the work every trip she leads entails—her team leads majority of the trips—she tries to find fun in them while ensuring her clients have a life-transforming experience. “I believe this is something I would give account to God for,” she says. “And I think I just want to tell God; I think I showed your people around.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of AMAKA’s The Business of Travel series, where we will profile women entrepreneurs across the African continent and its diaspora, who are building notable travel brands.