• SME Market Access Program
• SME Access to Finance
• Clean Energy Solutions
• Training and Facilitation
• Project Design and Strategy

SME Access to Finance

WHL Group has 8 years of experience working with tourism SMEs and helping them to improve their competitiveness.  Since 2008, WHL Consulting has taken on a specialized focus under this target, providing services to improve accommodation and tour provider market access. One of the major obstacles to building a sustainable business for many SME accommodation providers in the developing world is access to finance, where even funding for essential business activities such as market access tools/services and retrofits/renovations needed to reduce energy consumption and operating costs go unfunded. In many parts of the developing world where WHL Consulting has undertaken projects IF it is possible for a small accommodation provider to get a commercial loan they are faced with impossible interest rates and repayment terms -- as high as 27%!

We believe that it will be impossible for us to continue our mission as a sustainable development organization who works at improving SME competitiveness without addressing this key business development constraint. Over the years we have worked with development organizations, discussed with commercial banks, wooed micro-finance institutions with no luck. Our clients were either too small and risky (for commercial banks) or too large and not poor enough (for micro-finance institutions and donors). So we decided to go back to the laboratory...

What we came up with to solve the access to finance issue (thanks in large part to organizations like IDB MIF Sustainable Tourism Cluster and the South Africa Business Trust) is our own innovative financing tool: the Tourism Development Bank (TDB).

The TDB was set up to solve the access to finance problem by allowing tourism enterprises to purchase professional services using room nights instead of cash. Services are then paid for via the TDB, allowing SMEs to have the work done that they need to improve their competitiveness. Completion of work is verified by the WHL Group franchisee in the destination, which triggers the payment to the service company. The TDB is a formal barter based payment mechanism that allows accommodation providers to convert empty room stock into a tradable asset and be able to purchase goods and services they really need to improve their overall competitiveness. Rooms are perishable goods that expire every night a person does not sleep in them, and our experience over the past 8 years show that SMEs are sitting at an annual occupancy of less that 40%. This means that 60% of the inventory goes bad annually. It is also known that the marginal cost of servicing a room is extremely low, like 10-20% of the overall room rate, so paying a premium with rooms for services is possible. Once the rooms are in the TDB, WHL Consulting then leverages its position within the WHL Group to sell the rooms at rack rate through whl.travel portals or back to the local WHL Network partners for packaging.

WHL Consulting will only allow certain services to be faciltated through the tourism development bank which we see will reduce our risk through gains in productivity and cost savings for the SMEs. Today we are actively promoting Market Access Services through the TDB and have recently launched an Energy Efficiency Pilot Project to encourage SMEs to renovate or replace existing inefficent or dirty energy consumption.