Mark Essien is the founder and CEO of Hotels.ng which is an online travel agency that specializes in hotel booking in Nigeria. They help make the process of booking a hotel seamless by providing assistance and support to a client. The platform provides reviews and recommends hotels to ensure clients stay in a clean and comfortable hotel anyway in the country.
Hotels.ng has over 11,200 lists of hotels in over 1,700 cities in Nigeria. In 2018, the startup launched Hotel.africa which is an international hotel booking platform with over 27,300 lists of hotels in Africa and Fly.africa which renders flight services.
SmartPrenuer lists 7 things you should know about Mark Essien:
- He founded hotels.ng in 2013
- He had formerly built a file sharing software called Gnumm and was acquired by Snoopstar.com this was followed by a language learning startup he formed called Ingolingo
- In 2015, Mark made the Forbes list of 30 youngest entrepreneurs in Africa
- In 2016, Mark’s hotels.ng co-invested in OgaVenue, an event booking platform with Jason Njoku. Mark Essien is the director of the board of OgaVenue.
- Mark started a remote internship program in 2016 to train young people in software development. Interns are presented with real life problems which they are expected to solve using programming and design skills.
- Aside from being an entrepreneur, Mark is a startup investor and a software developer; he got married to a software developer as well, Jenni Naiaretti, in 2018.
- After Mark’s primary and secondary school education in Ikot Ekpene, Akwa Ibom state, he moved to Germany for his university education. He has a Bachelor of Engineering (B.Eng) in Computer Hardware Engineering from Beuth Hochschule, Berlin, Germany and M.Sc in Computer Science from Freie Universitat, Berlin, Germany
