Beyond the journey: Why Africa’s next premium travel opportunity is a connected payments and loyalty ecosystem

By Shehryar Ali

Africa’s travel sector is growing. According to UN Tourism, 81 million international travellers chose Africa in 2025, eight percent more than in 2024. This growth has provided an opportunity to rethink how travellers discover destinations, pay for experiences, and build lasting relationships with the brands that serve them.

For premium travellers in particular, the opportunity is no longer simply to offer a card with a higher spending limit or access to an airport lounge. It is to connect payments, loyalty and experiences into a proposition that delivers value throughout the journey, from planning a trip to discovering something memorable at the destination.

This is the thinking we put into the ShebaMiles Platinum Mastercard, developed with Dashen Bank and Ethiopian Airlines. This card reflects a broader shift in how we see the future of premium travel payments in Africa, which is less about isolated privileges and more about creating holistic, relevant and rewarding customer experiences.

The journey is becoming the product

Travel has always been about more than reaching a destination. What shapes decisions is what people will get to experience once they get there. Nature, wellness and culinary adventures are now important deciding factors for travellers choosing Africa, according to Mastercard Economics Institute’s (MEI) Travel Trends 2025 report. These evolving preferences offer the opportunity for destinations and businesses to differentiate themselves and connect with travellers through more meaningful and relevant experiences.

So, where do payments come in? Payments are what make these experiences seamless and connected. A traveller may book a flight digitally, pay for accommodation with a card, access an airport lounge, and later discover a local restaurant or cultural experience. While each transaction is part of the same journey, most often their benefits and experiences remain fragmented.

Our view is that a premium traveller should be able to connect these touchpoints effortlessly, focusing on the experience rather than the transaction, and translating an isolated visit into long-term loyalty.

Connecting payments with loyalty

The significance of such propositions like the ShebaMiles Platinum Mastercard lies less in the individual benefits than in how they connect parts of the travel journey that have traditionally operated separately.

The proposition is intentionally designed around the traveller rather than the transaction. Benefits such as earning loyalty miles through everyday purchases, enhanced travel experiences and access to complementary Mastercard privileges help create a more connected relationship between how customers spend, travel and engage with the brands they value. The aim is not simply to reward a purchase, but to make the overall travel experience more rewarding.

Dashen Bank brings the issuing relationship and digital banking channel. Ethiopian Airlines contributes its travel network and ShebaMiles loyalty programme, and Mastercard provides the payment infrastructure and associated benefits. Bringing these capabilities together creates the potential for more continuous engagement with travellers, including between trips. Whether that translates into lasting value will depend on how relevant, accessible and useful the experience proves to be for customers.

The collaboration builds on earlier work between Dashen Bank and Mastercard. In 2023, the two organisations introduced a multi-currency international prepaid card with physical and virtual formats, alongside payment gateway capabilities that help Ethiopian merchants accept international online payments. The latest initiative applies that relationship to another part of the economy, bringing banking, airline loyalty and travel benefits closer together. It reflects a wider question facing the industry: How can payment products become more useful to customers by connecting services around their needs, rather than simply adding more features?

The lesson is that a successful co-brand programme should be more than a logo shared between an airline, a bank and a payments company. It should bring together their capabilities around a clear customer proposition, with benefits that are accessible, relevant and valuable in practice.

From card benefits to meaningful experiences

For many travellers, a destination’s appeal lies in its experiences, from wildlife encounters and culinary traditions to cultural heritage and adventure. Making these experiences easier to discover can help destinations attract visitors while creating opportunities for local tourism businesses.

In June 2026, Priceless Africa brought together curated experiences across nine African markets, including sunrise balloon journeys over Amboseli, dhow sailing in Zanzibar and gorilla trekking in Uganda’s Bwindi forests. Meanwhile, a 2022 collaboration between Mastercard and the Kenya Tourism Board combined destination promotion with anonymised traveller insights to inform tourism marketing.

This experience-led approach is also reflected in premium card propositions. In Kenya, I&M Bank introduced Mastercard World Elite in July 2026, offering eligible cardholders dining, entertainment and travel benefits through The Mastercard Collection. Together, these developments reflect a broader shift: The value of premium loyalty increasingly depends on the experiences it enables, and on whether those experiences create meaningful connections between travellers and the destinations they visit.

Building an ecosystem that works beyond the airport

A seamless travel experience depends on more than what happens at departure gates and international hotels. It also depends on whether travellers can pay conveniently throughout their stay, including when they visit local restaurants, book tours, use transport or purchase goods from smaller businesses.

The shift towards digital payments is already visible. According to Mastercard Economics Institute’s 2024 Travel Trends analysis, tourism cash volumes in Sub-Saharan Africa, measured by ATM withdrawals relative to card spending, were approximately 10 percentage points lower in 2024 than in 2019. This indicates growing use of digital payments relative to cash withdrawals among visitors, although experiences and payment acceptance continue to vary across markets.

For tourism economies, this matters because the visitor experience extends into a much wider network of businesses. Payment acceptance, reliable digital infrastructure and convenient booking and checkout experiences can help connect travellers with that network. They can also help local enterprises participate in the economic value tourism generates.

This is where collaboration becomes essential. Airlines understand the traveller and the journey. Banks understand their customers and provide the financial relationship. Tourism operators create the experiences that attract visitors. Payment networks connect these activities, helping transactions move securely and conveniently across the ecosystem. No single organisation can deliver the entire experience independently.

The future is connected, not simply premium

Africa’s opportunity is to build travel and loyalty ecosystems that reflect the continent’s diversity, increasing global connectivity and distinct customer needs. That requires us to look beyond the traditional definition of a premium card. The more important questions are whether benefits are relevant; whether payments work seamlessly across the journey; whether loyalty creates reasons to return; and whether the ecosystem connects travellers with the destinations and businesses they want to experience.

The ShebaMiles Platinum Mastercard is one example of what becomes possible when banking, aviation and payments capabilities are brought together around these priorities. At Mastercard, we believe the future of premium travel payments will be defined by how well we connect technology with human experiences.

When payments, loyalty and travel work together, a card becomes more than a way to pay. It becomes a way to discover, experience and remain connected to the places and passions that make travel worthwhile.

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Shehryar Ali is the Mastercard Senior Vice-President and Country Manager for East Africa and Indian Ocean Islands