Kenyan travel technology company BuuPass has announced a strategic partnership with Nairobi-based digital wallet provider SafariBucks. The collaboration is designed to streamline payment workflows for cross-border travelers and enterprise clients, removing long-standing currency barriers across the African mobility landscape.
Through the partnership, travelers using BuuPass to book buses, flights, and ground transfers will be able to settle transactions directly through SafariBucks. The integration leverages local payment rails across target markets, allowing international and regional travelers to load funds into a single digital wallet before departure and transact seamlessly without incurring high informal exchange costs or relying on physical currency swaps at border crossings.
Streamlining Corporate Spend and Cross-Border Operations
Beyond consumer ticketing, the collaboration addresses structural frictions within corporate travel. SafariBucks’ Spend Management engine will integrate directly into Gavanpass, the corporate travel booking platform launched by BuuPass in April 2026.
Gavanpass provides enterprise finance and procurement teams with centralized tools for managing flight, hotel, bus, and ground transfer bookings alongside real-time spend tracking and approval workflows. By embedding SafariBucks into the Gavanpass interface, corporate clients can fund employee travel budgets and process cross-border expenses across multiple regional currencies from a single dashboard.
Sonia Kabra, co-founder and co-CEO of BuuPass, noted that while the company spent eight years constructing a robust travel distribution network, payment friction remained one of the primary pain points for regional travelers and enterprise clients. The SafariBucks integration is structured to resolve that payment layer without requiring users to alter their existing payment habits.
Leveraging Infrastructure for Regional Growth
Founded in 2016, BuuPass provides booking, inventory management, and digital infrastructure for over 150 transport operators. Operating across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa, the company’s platform connects to major regional payment channels, including M-PESA, MTN MoMo, First National Bank, and VodaPay.
The partnership comes on the heels of aggressive regional expansion by BuuPass. Following its acquisition of bus ticketing platform QuickBus in 2024, BuuPass reported selling over 30 million tickets and processing more than $100 million in travel volume throughout 2025. Under the new operational framework, BuuPass will continue managing primary travel inventory and operator distribution, while SafariBucks powers the cross-border payment architecture.
Ali Hassan, co-founder and CEO of SafariBucks, emphasized that the collaboration directly tackles systemic obstacles like card rejection, currency conversion costs, and cash dependency at border checkpoints.
Preparing for AFCON 2027 Scale
The timing of the integration positions both companies ahead of the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), which will be co-hosted by Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. The joint hosting of the tournament is projected to trigger an unprecedented surge in inter-state passenger movement across East Africa.
BuuPass and SafariBucks plan to deploy their combined travel-and-payment stack at scale during the tournament, using SafariBucks to facilitate digital fan wallets and BuuPass to manage inter-city transportation routes between match venues. By unifying inventory distribution with localized payment settlement, the alliance marks a significant milestone in building a borderless digital public infrastructure for African mobility.
