Cartology Travel launches dedicated Africa brand

London-based travel agency Cartology Travel has launched a specialist Africa arm to cater to a growing client base seeking bespoke experiences on the continent.

Cartology Africa will be headed up by co-founder Justin Huxter, who was born and raised in South Africa, and supported by the business’ Cape Town office.

The agency will also harness the expertise of Huxter's mother Susan, who owned luxury boutique hotel Le Quartier Français in Franschhoek for nearly 30 years.

“We’ve almost shied away from pushing our Africa expertise, contacts and connections and actually it’s such a good area of business that we need to lean into it,” Huxter said.

“Particularly for US and UK clients, working with someone who is from the area, travels here regularly and knows it first-hand is a lot better than trying to work through someone who has maybe been out once.”

Cartology Africa will focus on tailor-made and unique experiences, such as visiting the prison where Nelson Mandela was kept for the last two years of his imprisonment in South Africa and going heli-fishing on Mount Kenya.

“We know pretty much every general manager and owner in most of the safari lodges and hotels across Africa,” Huxter said.

“So for us it’s a combination of providing itineraries where we find the right properties for a client and then really trying to add in some moments of differentiation and uniqueness.”

Having travelled to Kenya and Tanzania in August last year, Huxter said there had never been a better time to go on safari, with fewer travellers making the majority of parks unusually quiet and even the most remote camps implementing masks, sanitisation protocols and strict social distancing measures, such as individual vehicles and guides.

“Kenya in August is peak season. In the Maasai Mara you could go to a river crossing and there could be anything from 100 to 200 vehicles. We were there and saw eight to 10 vehicles, so we had these places to ourselves,” he said.

“Your safari experience is just incredible because there is no one else around so you can sit at a sighting and just watch it because there’s no one else there.”

Cartology Travel has also recently taken on three new recruits under its Independent Consultant (IC) programme, bringing the team to eight, with five in the UK, two in the US and one in Argentina. Huxter said he hopes to grow the IC team to between 20 and 30 members.

“The feedback from the IC programme has been very encouraging,” he said.

“There’s been a lot of turmoil in the UK industry in the last year and so there’s a lot of very good people out there who might have been retrenched or furloughed and might want to do their own thing, so we tried to tap into that. 

“We’ve also got one or two [IC’s] who might not have been in travel before but have the networks and the passion for it so we’re helping them build their knowledge and expertise as they grow their business.”

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