What we would tell a young woman starting out in safari travel

The question we get asked most often by women starting out in this industry is where the effort should go first. Our answer has not changed. Put the guest at the centre of every decision, and get very good at the small things long before worrying about the big ones.

We both came out of corporate careers, though one of us arrived with travel experience already. Vikki spent her early career at IBM in HR and brand communications, then helped set up a tailor-made Africa business, so she came in with the contacts and a working feel for the trade. Sian was marketing director for MARS Southern Africa and came to safari travel from outside it entirely. Both of us had planned safaris for friends and colleagues for years before it occurred to either of us that it could be the business. So what follows is not theory. It is what we wish somebody had told us.

"Small, thoughtful details are what separate luxury from ordinary. That is the whole of it, and it is the part nobody teaches you."

Where should you start?

Whichever door you come in through, whether that is managing a lodge or setting up on your own, walk every touchpoint a guest will meet and ask what could be better. The enquiry email. The airport pickup. The first drink. The moment someone comes back to a room that has been quietly put right while they were out.

Most people starting out assume the answer is a grand gesture. It rarely is. The improvements guests remember are almost never the expensive ones.

What counts as a small detail?

The unglamorous kind. Spelling a guest's name correctly every time it appears in writing. Remembering the drink somebody asked for on the first night. Noticing that one half of a couple is anxious about something before either of them mentions it.

None of that appears on an invoice. All of it appears in how people describe the trip afterwards. The point is not the gesture, it is that the guest can tell somebody was paying attention. Refuse to treat the work as transactional and a good deal of the rest follows on its own.

Which skill is hardest to teach?

Listening. Every guest arrives with a set of expectations and almost nobody states them outright. Someone will say they want somewhere quiet and mean four entirely different things by it. The work is hearing what sits underneath the request, then meeting the need before it has been put into words.

Empathy is the other half of that, and in this industry it is not a soft skill. It is the product. A safari lands emotionally for most people in a way a city break does not. If you cannot read the room, you cannot design for it.

How hard is the work, really?

Hard, and in a shape that does not fit neatly around a diary. You will find yourself working across time zones, because your guests are somewhere else in the world and their day is not your day. Peak season does not care what else you had planned.

A strong work ethic is what carries you through the early years. Going the extra mile for guests and for colleagues is also how respect gets earned inside the industry, which is smaller and far better connected than it looks from the outside.

What if you want to start your own thing?

Then be confident about it. Between us we had one set of industry contacts, no client list of our own, and two corporate salaries to walk away from. What we did have was a long habit of planning other people's trips for the pleasure of it, an appetite for risk, and a question we kept putting to each other: would we still do this if we did not need the salary?

We said yes to everything and figured it out as we went, which is still how we work. The same goes for technology. We use all of it, and we would rather spend a week being bad at a new tool than keep doing something by hand because that feels safer.

This work rewards the people willing to leave a comfortable job and try. Do not wait to feel qualified. Go and stay in the places you intend to sell, learn them well enough to hold an opinion, and be honest when somewhere is wrong for a particular guest. That opinion is what clients are paying for.

What we would leave you with

There is no route map into this. The two of us arrived from a human resources department and a marketing department, which should tell you how many doors there are. The women we watch doing well in luxury safari travel are not the ones with the most industry years behind them. They are the ones who notice things.

If you want the longer version of how we got here, it is in how two women from outside the travel industry built a luxury safari brand, and there is more about the business on our story.

FAQ

Do you need a travel industry background to work in luxury safari travel?

Not necessarily. Both of us are ex-corporate. Vikki's early career was at IBM in HR and brand communications before she helped set up a tailor-made Africa business, so she came in with contacts. Sian was marketing director for MARS Southern Africa and came to safari travel from outside it. What carried over from both careers was an understanding of guests, of brands, of detail, and of how quickly trust is lost.

What skills matter most in luxury safari travel?

Listening, attention to detail, stamina, and a tolerance for other people's time zones. Most of the job is working out what a guest actually wants, which is rarely the same as what they first asked for.

How do you build credibility when you are starting out?

Go and stay in the places you plan to recommend. First-hand knowledge is what separates a specialist from a booking service, and it is the one thing that cannot be faked in a conversation with a well-travelled guest.

Is luxury safari travel a good career for women?

Women work across all of it, in lodge management, in guiding, in conservation, and on the planning side. The qualities the work rewards, noticing and listening and anticipating and remembering, are not gendered, though they are undervalued in plenty of other industries.

Who runs Marula Hill?

Marula Hill is co-founded by Vikki Jackson and Sian Loehrer and is owner-run from Hoedspruit in South Africa. The team is small. Roxanne, our reservations manager in Joburg, works alongside the founders, and your enquiry is answered by one of us rather than by a call centre.

Vikki Jackson and Sian Loehrer are the co-founders of Marula Hill Travel. We plan boutique safaris across South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Namibia, and Mozambique. We have stayed in most of the lodges we recommend, and we tell you when we have not.