Seated “Under the Mugumo Tree,” a panel titled “Still in the Game: Lessons from 30+ Years in Travel That No Strategy Book Can Teach” at the Kenya Association of Travel Agents’ 2026 Annual General Meeting in Mombasa, Mohamed Bafagih told a room of the industry’s next generation about the week his career fell apart.
When the planes stopped flying after September 11, 2001, Bafagih was working for Air France in Saudi Arabia, thousands of miles from home. The attacks triggered a sudden collapse in international air travel, as governments grounded flights, tightened security, and travelers stayed home. It was a shock that hit airlines’ revenues hard and forced many to cut back operations. Within weeks, Air France shut down its business in Saudi Arabia, and Bafagih was out of a job. His wife was expectant, his daughter was in school, and rent was due.
He sold what he owned and flew back to Kenya with nothing but his family.
“The biggest challenge was when I lost my job in Saudi Arabia during the Twin Towers attacks,” he told the gathering.
It was one of several such stories shared under the mugumo tree that day, a session built around a simple premise: that people who had spent three decades or more keeping the industry running had earned the right to be heard by the ones now taking it forward.
It was not the first time global events had reshaped his career, and it would not be the last. Today, 50 years after he entered the travel trade, Bafagih runs Vogue Tours and Travel Ltd, a travel agency in Mombasa, offering domestic and international ticketing, hotel bookings, customized holiday packages and other travel agency services.
Bafagih finished high school in 1973 with a distinction in geography, a subject he credits for shaping how far his ambitions reached, long before he’d ever left the country. “I knew the world when I was 20 years old,” he recalled.
He began his working life as a primary school mathematics teacher, a job he held for about three years before moving into travel. It was a different industry then: no internet, no booking software, just a phone and two well-thumbed reference guides that made up an agent’s entire toolkit.
“You had two books, ABC for the timetable of the flights, APT for the fares, and a phone,” he said. “And if you were good in geography, you were a travel agent.”
He had good timing, too. Kenya’s tourism sector was expanding fast: annual visitor arrivals had climbed from roughly 81,500 in 1965 to 343,500 in 1970, and by 1973, the year Bafagih left school, Nairobi alone was recording 418,000 landed air passengers a year, according to industry figures from the period.
Bafagih’s own path soon went international. He joined Air France and was posted to Dubai before moving on to Saudi Arabia. This trajectory placed him inside the airline industry just as Kenya’s tourism sector began absorbing a series of external shocks.
Arrivals had kept climbing through the 1980s, reaching about 614,000 in 1986 and 800,700 in 1990, as tourism became one of Kenya’s largest sources of foreign exchange. But the 1990-91 Gulf War knocked that momentum back, with arrivals dipping from 814,400 to 804,600 and coastal hotels disrupted before bookings recovered later that year. Later in the decade, political violence at the Coast in 1997 contributed to hotel closures and a 16 percent drop in occupancy, part of a broader slide in national arrivals from about 800,500 in 1996 to 672,000 in 1998.
Then came 2001. The September 11 attacks froze international aviation almost overnight. Kenya’s own arrivals fell 4.1 percent that year, with national statistics pointing to a collapse in confidence in air travel as a key factor; arrivals through Nairobi’s and Mombasa’s main airports dropped 11.6 percent. For Bafagih, the downturn wasn’t a statistic. It was the end of his job in Saudi Arabia, and the reason he came home with almost nothing.
Back in Kenya, he opened Vogue Travel. “I picked up very well,” he said of the business’s early years.
More than two decades on, he credits the company’s survival to a simple philosophy, one he says newcomers to the industry often overlook in the rush for fast commissions.
“You must build the business first. Offer great service. Have repeat clients. Build trust,” he said. “Avoid quick money: it is poison. Take your eligible commission. Be loyal to the customer.”
Bafagih is now thinking about what comes after him. He is candid that a family name on the door is not, by itself, a succession plan: anyone stepping in, including his own children, would need to earn it. “They need proper training,” he said.
It’s a philosophy that has outlasted more than one generation of the business itself. Vogue Travel has been a member of the Kenya Association of Travel Agents (KATA) for the better part of its history, long enough to have watched the association build up a dedicated presence on the Coast, strengthening its work nationally by making sure agents outside Nairobi are represented too. Bafagih built the company slowly, on trust and repeat clients rather than quick commissions, and that kind of standing membership isn’t incidental. It’s the same patience applied at the institutional level.
Where there is no family member ready to take over, he’s floated another route entirely.
“My idea was to give shares to employees if there is no relative to pick up the company,” he said.
His advice to anyone starting in travel today is much the same as the philosophy that carried him through two career-ending shocks. “You have to be patient, teach them, be hardworking. Help is very important.”
The reference books are gone, replaced now by booking engines, smartphones and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. The telephone on the desk has changed beyond recognition. The industry has been knocked down twice in Bafagih’s own working life alone, by wars and by a single September morning half a world away.
Fifty years after two books and a telephone were enough to make him a travel agent, Mohamed Bafagih is still building something meant to survive him.
