Have you ever wanted to book a hotel or place to spend the night and realised that the process was frustrating and rather time wasting? You had to drive to each hotel,then check their prices, drive to another to compare prices and return to probably find the entire hotel fully booked. Well, with Jovago those days are gone. Jovago is a hotel booking app and website you can use to book hotels in Uganda, all the other 15 countries where Jovago operates and some foreign destinations as well.
The Jovago App which runs on Android is a much simpler and faster way to access over 200,000 hotels with 25,000 of these in Africa on the Jovago platform. For starters, the app size was really small which is important because downloading it from the store will be faster and lighter on your data wallet.
Opening the app shows you a rather brief splash explaining the app and it asks you ‘where you want to go?’. I was impressed with the simplicity of the sign up which wasn’t length. Signing in is also just as simple. The Jovago App then asks for my location which the app uses to display hotels in the country I have selected. Remember the app also lets you choose a foreign destination/country so that you can find out hotel room prices, and book hotels in other countries which should come in handy when you are travelling.
The app sorts the hotels basing on the ‘Most Popular’, you can also sort hotel listing based on price, from the most expensive to the cheapest, or cheapest to most expensive, you can also sort them according to user ratings which I think you might find handy. I was pleased to find that most of the hotels if not all had photos which can be a good point of choice for a hotel but it makes the app look professional and beautiful.
Speaking of ratings, hotels on Jovago are rated by users much as there is a classification that has already been done. The user ratings are accompanied by a comments section where users can give feedback on a particular hotel. These ratings are displayed using stars out of 5.
Once you have found a particular hotel, the app will display the available rooms and their prices. In case a hotel is fully booked, the app will tell you that there no rooms available. Jovago is not just about hotel rooms since you are presented with various options basing on what a hotel offers, you can select whether you want a breakfast package, car pickup, and it shows the various packages and amenities that a hotel has such as a swimming pool, gym and sauna.
Think of this app as big information portal which means you will choose and book a room through a well informed decision. Its search is smart enough to find you rooms based on a given criteria such as number of adults in the room and the desired checkin and checkout time.
The book hotel button besides the room package and the app will show you booking details where you can confirm. Once you have booked a particular room package, Jovago will call the hotel on your behalf and book the room for you. There is also as section for entering a coupon code which can get you a discount from Jovago. Jovago has several coupons and we are sharing our coupon code APP20 which gets you a 20% discount on your first night you book using the app. Big shout out to Jovago for this.
Upon arrival your details will already be at the hotel since the app has your name and you may show a confirmation message from Jovago at times and you will be helped by the hotel management to your room. Remember that you have to make the physical payment at the hotel depending on whether the hotel will bill you before or after checkout since different hotels have different policies.
Some hotels show the ability to pay in advance with Mobile Money and Credit cards which should come in handy.
I noticed that all prices are in our local currency which makes it easier to plan. You can however change this by going to the settings on the menu. In fact Jovago will even show you prices for international hotels in our local currency which saved me from using a calculator. Jovago also shows Deals where it shows destinations with discounted prices for a particular period of time.
The app is even data consumption friendly as my tests showed minimal data usage.
I was disappointed when I found that there was no direct way of comparison of hotel. Yes it’s possible but you have to search for each hotel separately though I must say this is the biggest platform in Africa you can use. But after talking to the Jovago CEO, I realized it was actually illegal to have direct hotel comparisons.
Overall the experience is fun and fast, and if you are a traveler, you should go to you app store and download this because life just got sweeter. You can download the Jovago app on the Google Playstore by visiting this link
Screenshots of the Jovago App
