Ama Marfo
When she was an international student living far from home, Ama Marfo dreamt up a business plan to get her where she longed to be. Her company, Airfordable, is an online travel platform that offers a payment plan for flights before you fly.
When Thanksgiving and Christmas came around, Ama Marfo ’11 would sit alone in the dorm. Home was in Ghana: 5,000 miles and a $2,000 plane ride away. She didn’t have the upfront cash to buy a plane ticket and as a student, her credit card didn’t stretch far, either.
As she watched her friends post social media pictures of happy family gatherings, Marfo formulated a business plan.
“I thought, there had to be a way for people to travel without either having money saved or having the luxury of a credit card with an extensive line of credit,” says Marfo.
In 2015, Marfo launched Airfordable. The business now counts some 300,000 active users, drawn there by its simple premise: Book your flight today for only a fraction of the cost upfront and pay the rest in installments before you fly.
“I was familiar with the layaway concept in retail stores, and I thought it made sense to apply this concept to flights given the uniqueness of airfare pricing,” she says.
As a business administration major, Marfo had come to Drexel with an eye on a career in accounting. Her four co-op experiences in different industries taught her a lot about the nuts and bolts of how businesses operate, and also taught her something about herself: While she loves numbers, the monthly routine of accounting is a little slow for her taste.
The career services counselors at Drexel helped her put the pieces together, to see how her love of numbers, her general business sense and her growing interest in technology all could come together. They steered her toward work as a financial technology consultant for several Fortune 500 companies, and those experiences in turn helped her to launch her own business.
Marfo tried to go it alone at first, to learn coding and actually program her own software for Airfordable. Eventually she brought in outsourced help to build a prototype of the product, which in turn helped her partner with Airfordable’s co-founder Emmanuel Buah, a seasoned entrepreneur with a background in technology.
“It takes a leadership team with solid technical expertise and business acumen to build, scale and actually get Airfordable out on the market,” she says. “That was my biggest challenge, finding a partner who had that expertise and was ready to take a chance on this business model.”
With Buah on board, the wheels started turning and now the business is in full flight, adding new customers every day and booking flights to over 120 countries.
“I love being able to see the direct impact on people’s lives,” Marfo says. “Every day I get emails from customers saying how Airfordable has changed their lives. One woman had moved from Thailand and hadn’t been back to visit her mom in 20 years, and we were able to make that happen for her. That’s very rewarding.” — Adam Stone
