Hotel furniture from Turkey to West Africa: Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal

Hotel owners and developers in Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal can source guestroom furniture, beds, upholstery and joinery from Turkey by sea, on a direct weekly sailing. Rovers reads the BOQ and the drawings, prices every line with the Turkish partner factory that fits, issues shop drawings and samples for approval, follows production, inspects before packing, loads the containers, and delivers and installs on site.

Sea routes and transit

Arkas Line’s MAS service runs weekly from the eastern Mediterranean to West Africa, with its first voyage on 20 October 2025. Its Turkish load ports are Mersin and Aliağa (near İzmir).

Source: Arkas Line’s published transit table. These are port-to-port days; trucking to the load port, customs at both ends and the road leg to site come on top. For a factory in the Marmara region, Aliağa is the shorter truck run and the earlier arrival; the port is chosen per order on the freight quote.

Duty

Türkiye has no free trade agreement in force with Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire or Senegal, so Turkish furniture pays the ECOWAS common external tariff like goods from any other country. The tariff has five bands, from 0% to 35%, and the rate is set per HS line. Each line on our quote carries its HS code, so the importer’s clearing agent can confirm the rate before the order is placed.

Nigeria: Form M and SONCAP

Nigeria’s import process starts before anything ships.

Furniture is not on the revised Import Prohibition List that Nigeria Customs publishes (Third Schedule, uploaded in 2026). SONCAP covers all imported goods except listed groups such as food, drugs and used products, so a furniture order goes through it.

Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal

The core set is the same for each port: commercial invoice, packing list, bill of lading and a certificate of origin issued in Turkey. The importer’s clearing agent adds the local entry steps. Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal work in French, so the BOQ, the specs and the fire notes often arrive in French.

Projects funded by lenders

Some West African hotels are financed by development lenders such as the IFC. Those lenders set environmental and social standards for the project, and IFC Performance Standard 2 asks the borrower to find child-labour and forced-labour risks in its primary supply chain. When the owner passes these requirements on to suppliers, usually as a code of conduct to sign and a questionnaire about the factories, we complete them for the order and keep them in the order file with the inspection reports.

Packing for a long sea leg

A month at sea, then a hot port, is hard on furniture. Each piece is wrapped and boxed or crated by room, with the item code, room number and box count on the label. Timber crates and pallets are heat-treated and stamped to ISPM 15. The containers are loaded in the order the site installs, and the packing list matches the crate labels.

What to send us

Send the BOQ or the drawings, the operator’s spec and fire notes, the port and site city, the funding lender’s supplier requirements if there are any, and the date the rooms must be ready. Incoterms 2020: CIF or CFR to the named port is the usual start; DAP site when we deliver and install.