The Trip Home

In 2023, fifty-four billion dollars went home to Sub-Saharan Africa, and roughly fifty-six billion in 2024. The World Bank counts it to the dollar, prints it in a brief, and attaches next year's projection^[1]. The money home is measured.

It is also, increasingly, a product. You can send that money in seconds through an app built for nothing else: LemFi, one of several, moves more than a billion dollars a month^[2]. You can ship a barrel of clothes and tinned food across an ocean through a company that does only that, and roughly four million such barrels reach the Caribbean from the United States every year^[3]. You can stand at a checkout in London and have groceries delivered to your mother in Lagos. Every thread that ties a person to the place they came from has a dedicated product now, with a logo and a fee.

Except the thread where you go yourself.

A man flies from Johannesburg to Lusaka for his father's funeral. A woman flies from London to Lagos for a christening. They book the trip the way a couple from Munich books a week in Bali: a general travel site, a flight, a search for a room near an address that already holds family. The trip most of the world takes most often is the one nobody built a product for. This essay is about why, and about what that absence is worth.

The largest invisible category

The trip home has a name in the statistics, even with no name in the market. It is large, it is undercounted, and the undercounting is the first clue to the gap.

Tourism researchers call it VFR: visiting friends and relatives. It is the trip you take to be with people rather than to see a place, and it sits underneath the official numbers in a way that hides its size.

The honest figure complicates the story before it helps it. The UN's tourism body publishes a purpose-of-visit split, and in its most recent granular year, 2017, leisure led at fifty-five percent of international arrivals^[4]. So VFR is not the largest category, and any essay that claims it is loses the argument to its own first source. The interesting fact is the one underneath.

Leisure

55%

VFR + health + religion

27%

Business

13%

Unspecified

6%

The bucket holding VFR is the second largest, and it is the one the same statisticians flag as systematically undercounted. A traveller sleeping in a relative's spare room often files the journey as a holiday, so a share of that leisure bar is the trip home wearing a holiday's coat, and the spending that happens inside the family house never enters tourism's ledger at all^[5]. The category is real, large, and shrunk by the way it is counted.

Which raises the question this essay turns on. A trip this frequent, taken by this many people, for life: why has no travel company built for it?

The industry sells the bed

The answer is not blindness. It is the business model. Travel companies do not make their money moving people. They make it on the room, and the trip home is the one trip with no room to sell.

Look at where the money actually is. At Expedia Group, lodging brought in 10.95 billion dollars of 13.69 billion in 2024 revenue. Air ticketing brought in 428 million, around three percent^[6].

Lodging

$10.95B

Air

$428M

The pattern repeats across the industry. Airbnb's revenue, around eleven billion dollars in 2024, is almost entirely service fees on stays; it does not sell flights at all^[7]. Booking Holdings does not publish a clean split, but its own annual report says substantially all of its agency revenue comes from accommodation, and the unit counts tell the story plainly: 1.14 billion room nights booked in 2024 against 49 million airline tickets^[8].

Flights are not where the margin lives. Airlines pay online sellers almost nothing to distribute their seats. In late 2025 Ryanair agreed to let Booking.com, Expedia and Trip.com sell its flights for zero commission^[9]. The airlines barely make money on the seat themselves: the International Air Transport Association projects a net profit of 7.90 dollars per passenger for 2026, on a 3.9 percent margin, and its director general put it that Apple earns more selling an iPhone cover than an airline makes carrying the average passenger^[10]. The room is the opposite. Hotel commissions to the big platforms run from fifteen to twenty-five percent and higher^[11]. The bed is the engine. Everything else is a feature wrapped around it.

Now place the trip home against that model. You are flying to your sister's house. There is no room to book, no commission to earn, no margin to chase. The single most monetised object in travel, the bed, is the exact thing your trip does not need. The product was never withheld from the diaspora. Under the economics every incumbent runs on, it was never worth building.

This also answers the obvious objection. Should a Booking.com not want this traveller? It already has the traveller it wants. It earns on the room, and the funeral flight earns it close to nothing. An industry built on the bed has no reason to chase the one trip taken without one.

So the need scattered

The need did not vanish because no one productised it. It moved into the parts of the journey that are hard, costly, and unglamorous, the parts no booking funnel was ever shaped to hold.

The flight, at the worst possible moment. A funeral does not give notice. You fly in days, and last-minute is where airfare punishes hardest: booking inside the final six days before departure costs about fifty-nine percent more than the cheapest window weeks out, across a study of more than 917 million fares^[12]. The thing airlines once offered for exactly this, the bereavement fare, has mostly gone. American and United both dropped theirs in 2014, United's having been a token five percent discount, and where the fares survive they are often a cut off the full unrestricted price, which can land above the ordinary fare you would have found yourself^[13]. On African routes the structure is worse before the emergency even starts: African carriers run the world's highest operating costs, a hundred-dollar ticket can carry sixty to seventy dollars of taxes and charges, and it remains common to fly through Europe to reach a neighbouring African city. The continent launched a Single African Air Transport Market in 2018 precisely because the internal map is so badly connected^[14].

The goods, carried on your own back. The diaspora traveller is rarely just a passenger. They are the family's courier, and the practice is old enough to have names. Filipinos call it the balikbayan box, "return to country," a carton of goods sent home that the state recognises in law and lets through tax-free^[15]. Jamaicans grew up as "barrel children," raised in part on the barrels of food and clothing shipped ahead of a parent who had migrated^[16]. The official definition of remittances already counts these: the term covers "cash and in-kind transfers," goods as much as money^[17]. None of it is free. A second checked bag on an intercontinental economy ticket runs around a hundred dollars, and a bag tipping past the weight limit adds a hundred to two hundred more^[18]. The trip home carries a freight bill no product itemises or eases.

The document, to enter your own origin. For many in the diaspora, going home requires permission to do so. Countries that bar dual citizenship strip it from those who naturalise elsewhere, which is why India created the Overseas Citizen of India card in 2006, a lifelong visa, not citizenship, so people of Indian origin can return to the country that was once theirs^[19]. And the passport you hold decides how freely you move at all: a Singaporean passport opens 192 destinations visa-free, an Afghan one 24, and Schengen visa rejections for African applicants climbed from 18.6 percent in 2015 to 26.6 percent in 2024^[20].

Afghanistan

24

Singapore

192

Each dot ≈ 8 destinations

The timing, shared by everyone at once. Diaspora trips cluster on the same dates, because that is when the family gathers. Each December, returning Nigerians drive the surge known as Detty December: roughly 1.2 million visitors into Lagos, and fares on the route doubling as the month approaches^[21].

Four separate frictions, four separate industries half-serving them, and no single product that sees the trip whole.

Served everywhere except travel

Put it together and the shape is strange. The bond between a diaspora and home is one of the most heavily productised relationships on earth. Money has a product. Goods have a product. Presence does not.

The money leg is solved: remittance apps move tens of billions along these corridors, and a single one clears a billion dollars a month^[2]. The goods leg is solved: barrel shipping is a mature industry, and a wave of newer companies, Yassir's "Send Love Home," Helpmewaka and others, lets the diaspora buy groceries and essentials delivered straight to family back home^[22]. The presence leg, the trip itself, is left to general travel sites that were built for the holiday and a handful of airline fare promotions. Heritage startups help first-time roots travellers; one of the better known says outright that it is "not a travel app"^[23]. General platforms like Wakanow carry diaspora traffic without building for it. Nobody has built the trip-home stack.

The industry is starting to notice the symptom. In May 2026, Skift, travel's main trade publication, named what it called "the neither economy," the people who move for family and life but fit no category, and called it travel's big blind spot^[24]. Naming it is the first step, and the trade press naming it means it is real, not a private hunch. The step it stops short of is the why, which is the bed, and the conclusion a trade publication will not print: a market this frequent, this loyal, and this permanent, served in every dimension except the one that moves the person, is not a missing feature. It is a missing company.

The unbuilt company

For most of travel's history, building for the trip home made no sense. The reasons it was skipped are the reasons it is now an opening.

Consider the customer the incumbent model could not love. VFR travellers spend little on accommodation, fourteen percent of their outlay in one national study, because they stay with family^[25]. But they travel often, return for decades, and hold steady when leisure and business travel collapse: through the pandemic, VFR demand proved among the most resilient, because people keep going home in a downturn^[26]. Measured one transaction at a time, by the value of a room booked, this traveller looks marginal. Measured across a lifetime of repeated journeys, they are among the most loyal customers in travel. The incumbent model only knows how to see the first number.

That is the definition of an opening: a large, loyal, permanent market that is invisible to the people who dominate the industry, invisible precisely because serving it breaks their economics. It went unbuilt because the work is unglamorous and fragmented, a flight here, a visa there, a freight problem, a calendar problem, with low margin on any single piece. That is exactly the kind of thing that is now cheap to build. The same tools that let one person assemble what used to take a team make the unglamorous, fragmented, low-margin-per-trip company viable for the first time, when the market behind it is measured in lifetimes instead of transactions.

There is a deadline on it. The layer that recommends travel is being handed to AI agents, and an agent is only as wide as the categories it inherits. Ask one to plan a trip and it reaches for the structures already written down: a destination, dates, a room, the holiday. If the trip home was never a category, the agent will book the funeral flight as though it were a beach week, because that is the only shape it was given. The defaults are being set right now, in this window, by whoever builds against them.

I build travel products for the people they were not built for. Sola, the first, is for women who travel alone, another traveller the existing model sees only at the edges. The trip home is the same shape of problem at a larger scale: the oldest trip there is, taken by most of the world, and structurally invisible to an industry built to sell the bed. Someone is going to build the company for it. The only question is whether they build it before the defaults harden.

Sources

1. [1]Remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa were $54 billion in 2023 and projected at roughly $56 billion in 2024. World Bank / KNOMAD, Migration and Development Brief 40, 26 June 2024.↑
2. [2]Diaspora-focused remittance fintech LemFi reported processing more than $1 billion per month; it raised $53 million in January 2025. Reported across African tech press and company announcements.↑
3. [3]An estimated four million shipping barrels per year are sent from the United States to the Caribbean, the backbone of long-running 'barrel' shipping culture. Scope of Work, 'Remittance by the Barrel.'↑
4. [4]UN World Tourism Organization purpose-of-visit split for international tourist arrivals, 2017 data (the last granular year published before the pandemic disrupted the series): leisure/recreation/holidays 55%, VFR + health + religion + other 27%, business 13%, unspecified 6%. Reported via Michigan State University Extension summarising the UNWTO International Tourism Highlights.↑
5. [5]UNWTO methodology notes that VFR is systematically undercounted, because travellers accommodated by friends or relatives often self-classify as being on holiday, and that leisure is the leading purpose of visit in every world region except the Middle East. Summarised with UNWTO citations in the 'Visiting friends and relatives' overview.↑
6. [6]Expedia Group revenue by service type, FY2024: Lodging $10,950M, Air $428M, Advertising and media $954M, Other $1,359M, Total $13,691M. Lodging was about 80% of revenue, air about 3%. Expedia Group Form 10-K FY2024, US Securities and Exchange Commission.↑
7. [7]Airbnb's revenue (about $11.1 billion in 2024) is service fees on bookings of stays and experiences; the company does not sell flights. Airbnb Q4 and full-year 2024 results.↑
8. [8]Booking Holdings states in its FY2024 Form 10-K that 'substantially all of our agency revenue is from Booking.com's accommodation reservations,' and reports 1,144 million room nights against 49 million airline tickets for 2024. US Securities and Exchange Commission.↑
9. [9]In late 2025 Ryanair agreed distribution deals letting Booking.com, Expedia and Trip.com sell its flights at zero commission, with OTAs charging their own service fee to the traveller instead. Skift, December 2025.↑
10. [10]The International Air Transport Association projects global airline net profit of $7.90 per passenger in 2026 on a 3.9% net margin; Director General Willie Walsh's comparison to Apple earning more on an iPhone cover. IATA press release, 9 December 2025.↑
11. [11]Online travel agency hotel commissions commonly run from about 15% to 25% (Booking.com roughly 10 to 25%, Expedia roughly 15 to 30% for independent hotels), versus the near-zero commission airlines pay. Industry sources compiled by AltexSoft and Cloudbeds.↑
12. [12]Booking inside the final six days before a flight costs about 59% more than the cheapest 'prime' window of roughly 21 to 74 days out, from CheapAir's annual study of more than 917 million US airfares.↑
13. [13]American Airlines and United both ended bereavement fares in 2014 (United's had been a 5% discount), citing cheaper online last-minute fares; where bereavement fares survive they are often a discount off the full unrestricted fare and can exceed an ordinary fare. CNN; Seattle Times; Delta's own bereavement page notes promotional fares 'may serve as a better option.'↑
14. [14]African carriers face the world's highest unit costs (cost per available tonne-kilometre near 140 US cents versus about 70 globally, IATA, 2025); a $100 ticket can carry $60 to $70 in taxes and charges (IATA); intra-African connectivity is weak enough that routing via Europe between African cities is common. The Single African Air Transport Market launched on 28 January 2018. IATA; AFRAA; African Union.↑
15. [15]The Filipino 'balikbayan box' ('return to country') is a carton of goods sent home by overseas Filipinos, popularised in the 1980s and recognised in Philippine law with tax-free allowances.↑
16. [16]'Barrel children,' a term coined by University of the West Indies sociologist Claudette Crawford-Brown, describes Caribbean children raised in part on barrels of food and clothing shipped home by a migrant parent.↑
17. [17]The official statistical definition of personal remittances explicitly covers 'cash and in-kind transfers,' and migration research classifies remittances as financial, in-kind (goods), and social. IOM World Migration Report 2024.↑
18. [18]On major US carriers, a second checked bag on an intercontinental economy ticket is about $100, and an overweight bag (roughly 24 to 32 kg) adds about $100, rising to about $200 above that. United and American Airlines baggage fees, 2026.↑
19. [19]India bars dual citizenship, so people of Indian origin who naturalise abroad lose Indian citizenship; the Overseas Citizen of India card, launched in 2006, gives them a lifelong, multiple-entry visa (not citizenship) to return.↑
20. [20]Henley Passport Index, January 2026: Singapore ranks first with visa-free access to 192 destinations, Afghanistan last with 24. Schengen visa rejection rates for African applicants rose from 18.6% in 2015 to 26.6% in 2024. Henley & Partners.↑
21. [21]Nigeria's 'Detty December' diaspora return drew roughly 1.2 million visitors into Lagos, with route fares roughly doubling as the month approached. CNN, December 2025.↑
22. [22]Alongside long-established barrel shipping, newer services let the diaspora buy goods delivered to family back home: Yassir's 'Send Love Home' (groceries and meals to family across North and West Africa) and Helpmewaka (errands and grocery subscriptions for the West African diaspora), among others.↑
23. [23]Diaspora travel today is served by adjacent niche players rather than a dedicated trip-home product: heritage-preparation platform OurRoots.Africa describes itself as 'not a travel app,' while general OTAs such as Wakanow carry diaspora traffic without building specifically for it.↑
24. [24]Skift, 'The Neither Economy: Travel's Big Blind Spot,' 1 May 2026, argues that people who move between countries for work and family fit no traditional travel category (such as VFR) and are largely ignored by industry data and strategy.↑
25. [25]Visiting friends and relatives travellers spend comparatively little on commercial accommodation (about 14% of spend in Tourism Research Australia's 2019 VFR profile, with most nights spent in family homes) but generate large total value through food, transport, gifts and longer stays.↑
26. [26]VFR travel is characterised in tourism research as high-frequency and repeat, with high traveller lifetime value (Meis, Joyal and Trott, 1995), and proved among the most resilient forms of demand through the COVID-19 disruption, since people continue travelling to family in downturns (Kwon, 2024).↑