Ever heard of Luxury Shortlets? If you haven’t, you’re about to. Two sisters, Bisola and Bukola Animashaun, have quietly built one of Nigeria’s most trusted names in shortlet apartments, and their story is anything but ordinary.
Before Bisola was running one of the largest shortlet portfolios in the country, she was delivering cooking gas door to door in Abuja.
At 21, she started Gasurgently, a mobile gas delivery business. It taught her everything the hard way: logistics, customer service, resilience, before the business eventually closed after three years of thin margins. “Mine started when things didn’t work,” she says. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was in training”.
At that time, she had garnered enough experience to face the big hurdle that lay ahead.
That training paid off. Today, Bisola and her sister, Bukola, run Luxury Shortlets, a Nigerian booking agency with more than 1,000 apartments across Lagos and Abuja, over 10,000 guests hosted, and more than ₦1 billion in bookings facilitated in five years, all without taking a single outside investor.
Bukola, who studied Metallurgical Engineering, runs the Lagos side of things. Bisola, a first-class graduate in Mass Communication, handles Abuja, brand and marketing. The split is fifty-fifty. “There’s no boardroom politics when it’s your sister,” Bisola says. What takes other companies weeks to resolve takes just a phone call“.
The business gets tested hardest every December, when Lagos demand can multiply as much as tenfold. “If you’re calling us in November for a December apartment, you’re already late,” Bisola laughs.
The sisters aren’t stopping at shortlets either. Their next venture, STAY AFRIK, will package African travel experiences for international tourists, drawing on hospitality lessons gathered across Kenya, Thailand, the Seychelles, Ghana and Dubai. “Nigerians have mastered hosting each other,” Bisola says. “The next step is hosting the world.”
Wole Alakija
08055001823
