Duty travel and business travel booking for organisations in Africa.
Flights and hotels for your staff, with pre-approval, policy and spend reporting in the same portal. Served from Cairo.
altovo TravelDesk is a duty travel application and business travel booking tool used by companies, NGOs, development agencies, banks, telcos and government bodies across North, East, West and Southern Africa. Staff book within their grade, approvers sign off before ticketing, and finance sees every trip by department, cost centre and project, in the currency you choose. Licence it directly from altovo, or through your local travel management company.
- Flights and hotels in one search
- Entitlement by grade
- Pre-approval before ticketing
- Multi-currency, multi-country
- SSO with your identity provider
Served from Cairo, backed by Dubai and London.
altovo was founded in the UK in 2021 and is headquartered in Dubai. The legal entity is altovo FZ-LLC. Our Cairo office covers Africa and the wider MENA region, so an organisation in Nairobi, Lagos, Accra or Johannesburg deals with a team in a neighbouring time zone, not a reseller.
Cairo, Egypt
Our Cairo office serves the whole continent: Egypt and Morocco in the north, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda in the east, Nigeria and Ghana in the west, and South Africa in the south.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Our head office and the home of altovo FZ-LLC. Product, platform and the content relationships behind TravelDesk are run from here. See the Middle East page for the Gulf.
London, United Kingdom
Where altovo started in 2021. Our sales line is UK-based and serves all regions, so the first conversation is the same whether you are in Addis Ababa or Casablanca.
Duty travel for NGOs, agencies and public bodies.
Across Africa, official travel by staff of ministries, development agencies, NGOs, banks and telcos is called duty travel. It has its own rules: an entitlement by grade, pre-approval before any booking, a list of permitted carriers, and an audit trail for every trip. Most duty travel applications are a form that sits outside the booking. TravelDesk puts the rules inside it.
Entitlements become policy rules by employee grade, so a programme officer sees the cabin and hotel level their grade allows. Pre-approval becomes a mandatory approval step before ticketing. The permitted carrier list becomes preferred content in search. The audit trail is the booking history you already have, with the approver and reason on every trip.
Travel arrangers book on behalf of field staff who are often offline or in transit. When an approver is on leave or on mission, a deputy is set for the period so trips do not stall. Spend is reported by department, cost centre and project, so a country office can show a donor what was spent on which programme.
How a duty travel rule maps to TravelDesk
- Entitlement by grade Cabin class and hotel cap rules per employee grade
- Pre-approval Mandatory approval step before ticketing
- Permitted carriers Preferred and excluded airlines and hotels in policy
- Audit trail Full booking history, approver and reason on every trip
- Donor reporting Spend by department, cost centre and project, exportable
- Arrangers Book for field staff and delegations from one login
- Deputisation A deputy approver covers leave and missions, so trips do not stall
Flights and hotels across the continent and intercontinental.
TravelDesk runs on the same inventory as the rest of the altovo platform. One search covers GDS, NDC and low-cost content together, so an intra-Africa routing that mixes carriers, Nairobi to Lagos or Accra to Addis Ababa, shows up alongside the long-haul trip to Europe or the Gulf.
Airlines
650+ airlines bookable, including NDC (as of Oct 2026), through Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport and direct NDC. Low-cost carriers sit alongside full-service airlines in the same search.
Hotels
Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Accor, Hyatt and Wyndham alongside aggregators such as Hotelbeds, WebBeds and Expedia, with nightly rate caps per city set in your policy.
Cities with car rental
Airport transfers and car rental in 200 cities, added to the same itinerary as the flight and hotel so the trip is complete door to door.
Search across GDS, NDC and LCC
Every source is queried in one search. A trip that needs a full-service leg and a low-cost leg is built in one itinerary, approved once and invoiced once.
Multi-currency, multi-country.
An organisation with offices in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa books in three countries and reports in one. TravelDesk is set up for that from the start, with the exchange rate you agreed and one invoice per billing profile.
50+ currencies, FX at your agreed rate
Price and settle in the currency your head office reports in, or let each country office use its own. Automated FX is applied at the rate you agree with us, so a fare bought in one currency lands on the invoice at a number finance can reconcile.
80+ payment gateways
The portal sits on 80+ payment gateways, so settlement is set up for the markets you operate in rather than forced through one route. We confirm the gateway for each country during scoping.
One invoice per billing profile
Each country office or programme can have its own billing profile with its own currency and language. Trips settle to that profile and arrive as a single company invoice, rather than a drawer of staff receipts and expense claims.
Reporting your finance team can use
Spend by department, cost centre, project, traveller, route and period, with policy compliance alongside. Export to CSV or feed your BI tool or data warehouse, so travel shows up in the same reports as every other cost.
Security, data and compliance.
Banks, telcos, development agencies and government bodies run a vendor review before any booking tool touches staff data. These are the answers.
Certifications
SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and PCI-DSS Level 1. GDPR compliant.
Hosting and data residency
Hosted on AWS across multiple regions. Data residency requirements differ by jurisdiction, so the options are discussed per country. Speak to the team before your review and we will set out what applies to you.
Single sign-on
SSO with your corporate identity provider, restricted to your organisation's email domain. Nobody manages a second password, and leavers lose access when their account is closed.
Buying TravelDesk in Africa.
Licence TravelDesk directly from altovo, or through a local TMC in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Morocco or any other market on the continent. Either way, the platform and the process are the same.
Walkthrough and scope
A 30-minute session on the demo portal, configured for your routes, grades and approval chain. We agree content, currencies, billing profiles and any finance or HR connection you need.
Pricing, quoted for your organisation
TravelDesk is a published platform fee plus a flat per-trip fee. No percentage of your travel spend, so your cost does not rise when fares do. Pricing is quoted by sales. If you buy through a TMC, they licence the platform and set your pricing.
Connect identity, set policy, go live
Connect your identity provider, load your duty travel policy and approvers, invite travellers by domain. There is no custom build, so an organisation can be live in weeks.
Duty travel questions from Africa.
Ready to put your duty travel in one place?
Book a walkthrough and we will configure the demo portal for your grades, approval chain and currencies before the call.
Book a walkthrough