The numbers alone tell a good story: Lagos’s 2025 Detty December season generated an estimated N396.54 billion in consumer spending, according to BusinessDay’s own reporting, more than triple the N111.5 billion the season pulled in just a year earlier.
Diaspora visitors accounted for 55 percent of that spending, and arrivals from the United States overtook the United Kingdom for the first time. But Nigeria’s own tourism watchdog wasn’t celebrating in the middle of it.
Femi Fadina, national president of the Association of Tourism Practitioners of Nigeria, warned partway through the season that the growth was starting to eat itself. “Detty December did not become a global phenomenon because Nigeria had a well-structured tourism framework. It grew despite the absence of one,” he said, adding that operators were attempting “to extract a year’s profit within a single month.” The result, in his account, is a market where luxury pricing gets attached to average service, and visitors start looking elsewhere on the continent instead.
Into that gap steps StayAfrik, a Nigerian travel company whose December 2026 flagship, Eko for Show (Lagos): A December to Remember, is a seven-night, twelve-guest package running December 11 to 18, built, its founders say, to be everything that complaint is not.
The price tag: from $5,300 a guest.
StayAfrik is confident the number holds up, arguing that guests already spend close to that on a single big night out at one of Lagos’s popular lounges during the season, tables and drinks alone.
Held up against that kind of spending, a week starts to look less like an indulgence and more like arithmetic: seven nights in five-star accommodation, transportation handled door to door for the full stay, curated evenings at handpicked restaurants and lounges, entry to one of December’s biggest concerts, a private boat cruise on the Lagos lagoon, and a day trip out to Badagry, as far as the Point of No Return itself. Twelve guests, no more, per cohort.
None of this started as a business plan. It started as five years of watching December get harder to love. Bisola Animashaun and her sister Bukola have run a Lagos hospitality and short-stay rental business since before Detty December was a headline, and they watched the season change in real time: roughly three years ago, what had been a loose cultural spike turned into the phenomenon it is today, and the city’s capacity never quite caught up.
Visitors flying in from London or Houston or Toronto for the first time got quoted prices that bore no relationship to what a local would pay, purely because they read as outsiders. Money that should have bought a five-star night bought something closer to average. People who could afford anything still didn’t know who to call.
What StayAfrik is actually selling is origin, not just familiarity. Bisola and Bukola aren’t Lagosians by relocation; their state of origin is Lagos State, Eko itself, and that shapes the small decisions a package like this lives or dies on: which route survives a bridge backup, which nights on the Island are worth the traffic and which are hype, which restaurant is worth the wait. Behind that sits five years running a hospitality and short-stay rental business, a real, unglamorous guest experience, combined with their own travel habit and an eye trained on luxury and curated experience elsewhere.
Bisola frames the opportunity less as beating competitors than as catching up with an industry that hasn’t caught up with itself. “Lagos has a lot to offer. It’s just unpackaged,” she says. “Nigerian tourism is still in its growth stage. Nigerians are friendly, Lagosians especially, but we’re not a naturally touristic country the way some other African destinations are, places that built real revenue on tourism for decades. Nigeria is only just starting to take tourism seriously, and because of that, a lot of the infrastructure isn’t there yet to take care of visitors properly without an expert travel concierge guiding them. That’s what we’re doing with StayAfrik.”
The expertise isn’t new, only the branding is. For years, StayAfrik’s founders quietly built December itineraries for their existing hospitality clients, sourcing drivers, negotiating tables, choreographing an entire week without ever calling it a product. 2026 is the first year they’re doing it under a dedicated name, open beyond their existing client list, at a fixed price.
The package has a specific traveller in mind. Diaspora Nigerians coming home for the season. Foreigners who have never had to find their way around Lagos and discover, fast, that the city rewards a guide. Landing in a group solves a real problem for anyone without a ready Lagos-based friend circle willing to build a week around them. Nobody’s turned away; Lagosians curious about their own city are welcome too, but the design centre is the outsider.
Bookings for the Lagos package, and StayAfrik’s other 2026 offerings, are open now: at stayafrik.com, by email at [email protected], or on WhatsApp at +234 815 557 7245.
The cohort holds at twelve. Opening this many weeks out looks unusual only until you remember who’s running it: five years of watching December’s calendar fill early, and prices climb late taught them to move first. It’s a small, deliberate step toward the bigger claim Bisola makes about where this is headed. “Nigerians have mastered hosting each other,” she says. “The next step is hosting the world.”
Ifeoma Okeke-Korieocha is the Aviation Correspondent at BusinessDay Media Limited, publishers of BusinessDay Newspapers.
She is also the Deputy Editor, BusinessDay Weekender Magazine, the Saturday Weekend edition of BusinessDay.
She holds a BSC in Mass Communication from the prestigious University of Nigeria, Nsukka and a Masters degree in Marketing at the University of Lagos.
As the lead writer on the aviation desk, Ifeoma is responsible and in charge of the three weekly aviation and travel pages in BusinessDay and BDSunday. She also overseas and edits all pages of BusinessDay Saturday Weekender.
She has written various investigative, features and news stories in aviation and business related issues and has been severally nominated for award in the category of Aviation Writer of the Year by the Nigeria Media Nite-Out awards; one of the Nigeria’s most prestigious media awards ceremonies.
Ifeoma is a one-time winner of the
prestigious Nigeria Media Merit Award under the ‘Aviation Writer of the Year’ Category.
She is the 2025 Eloy Award winner under the Print Media Journalist category.
She has undergone several journalism trainings by various prestigious organisations.
Ifeoma is also a fellow of the Female Reporters Leadership Fellowship of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism.
