Safaricom Subscribers Can Now Use Storo Bonus for Data

Storo Bonus

When Kenya’s largest telco by subscribers and revenue introduced Storo Bonus back in 2015, it was a way of encouraging its then 25.7 million subscribers to spend more airtime on the network. How this works is that each user has their own personal target of how much they should spend in a day in order to receive the 100% bonus airtime that can be used for on-net calls and SMS.

It was a brilliant strategy that saw many Kenyans rush to reach their daily targets, because, free things. The honeymoon period quickly wore down as subscribers started claiming that the targets were too high while others said that they would get the Storo Bonus airtime minutes to midnight, which is when they expire.

Over the year, Safaricom has done little to change the way Storo Bonus works, it has just remained to be a gem that gives subscribers a reason to call their ex (read long-lost friends) whenever the bonus pops up.

On September 3, 2018, the company’s CEO, Bob Collymore tweeted what we consider to be the biggest change coming to Storo Bonus, “You can now use your Storo Bonus to buy Storo data bundles,” read part of the announcement:

This means that once a subscriber meets their daily target, they can then use the awarded bonus airtime to purchase data bundles. However, note that you can only purchase from a specific list of bundle offerings accessible through *460# and selecting option 6.

This news was well-received by subscribers but in true Kenyan fashion, they did not lack a thing or two to complain about, the major issue being that Safaricom should extend Storo Bonus’ expiry period to 24 hours after being awarded and not just until midnight of the same day.

With one particular subscriber proposing the validity to be extended to 48 hours: