Digital Exclusion in Ethiopia's Affordable Accommodation Sector: A PIECES-Based Requirements Analysis and Platform Implementation

Ethiopia's domestic travel market is large, seasonally volatile, and overwhelmingly price-sensitive, yet the digital booking platforms operating in the country serve almost exclusively the upper tier of the hotel market. The small hotels, guesthouses, and pensions that actually accommodate students, job seekers, patients, traders, and festival pilgrims remain largely invisible online. This paper reports a qualitative field study of how affordable accommodation is currently discovered, booked, recorded, and reported in Ethiopia, and derives from it a requirements specification for a platform designed to fit that reality rather than to import a model built for a different market. Data were collected over three to four months through semi-structured interviews with ten accommodation providers spanning small hotels, guesthouses, and pensions, interviews with more than thirty domestic travelers drawn from a range of income levels, and direct observation at approximately ten sites in Addis Ababa and Bishoftu. Problems were coded using the PIECES framework. The analysis surfaces three findings that a generic booking platform would not anticipate: parallel record-keeping, in which providers who own digital billing software continue to track occupancy in notebooks because the software does not model availability; the retention of guest identity documents at reception as a substitute for a deposit or a signed contract; and a mandatory daily guest-registration report to local police that constitutes the only fully standardized data artifact in the entire workflow. We argue that this reporting obligation, usually treated as regulatory overhead, is the most credible adoption incentive available to a digital platform in this market. The derived requirements have been realized as a working web platform; empirical evaluation of adoption is the subject of continuing work.