Sarah Dusek Founder of Few & Far and Under Canvas

We sit down with Sarah Dusek to explore how a six-suite, five-star safari lodge can fund rewilding, restore soils, and open access to wilderness without compromising design, comfort, or values. We trace the path from Under Canvas to Few and Far, and dig into pricing, inclusion, funding, and carbon goals.

• glamping origins and the leap from under canvas to few and far
• operational headwinds, capital stacks, and industry maturity
• designing hybrid cliff suites with locally milled eucalyptus
• biodiversity of the soutpansberg and rewilding vision
• low-volume guiding and authentic wildlife experiences
• pricing model and nature has no price tag access
• sustainability as the floor, regeneration as the aim
• soil health, carbon sequestration, and fence removal
• the three ps framework for long-term balance
• scaling plans across 100,000 hectares by 2030
• curated global trips and independent hotel partners
• teams, grit, and staying power in tough markets
• ai for speed and personalization without losing human touch

Sarah's websites: 

fewandfarluvhondo.com

fandftravel.com

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Transcript

Sarah Dusik Returns & Glamping Origins

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to the Outdoor Hospitality Podcast. I'm your host, Carnegie Schwab. And today we are joined by one of my very favorite people in the entire industry and the entire world, Sarah Dusick. Sarah, welcome.

SPEAKER_03 0:11

Hello. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Welcome back. I think it's your third time on the show. I don't know. Which makes me feel very lucky. I'm sure you're on quite a few shows and podcasts. I know you've become kind of a thought leader in the outdoors, outdoor and travel space, the sustainability and conservation space, you know, women in leadership, women in capital, because you're doing a lot of really exciting things. And well, if you don't know already, hopefully you know who Sarah is. She's kind of a household name, founder and pre-former owner of uh Under Canvas before she sold. And then also the founder of Enigma Ventures, which is focused on providing capital to women-owned startups. And then now she's working on Few and Far, which has a brick and mortar location in South Africa, as well as Few and Far Travel, which we'll get to dive into and learn a little bit more about today. But I think if I had to boil down to having one hero in this industry, it's probably you, Sarah. And you've done such an incredible. And I mean that. I'm not just blowing smoke. The what you've been able to accomplish both from a professional business standpoint, whilst also not compromising on your values, particularly around sustainability and conservation, and do both of those at 100%, or at least from my perspective and what I've seen. I think it's extremely impressive, you know, kind of like a lot like the Patagonia of the Glamview world is the way that I see it. And yeah, so welcome back. And maybe you could give us just we'll get into few and far in just a sec, but maybe you could give us just a quick, you know, two, three-minute update on Under Canvas and your role there. And if anyone wants to get the full story, they can go back and listen to your former episodes and then we can move into what you've been up to lately.

SPEAKER_03 2:00

Yeah, I um my husband and I founded Under Canvas back in 2009 when the glamping industry didn't exist. I know it's hard to imagine today, and there are so many glamping resorts and so many extraordinary places across the United States and beyond. It's hard to imagine that this was not, you didn't used to be a thing, but it really didn't used to be a thing.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

I remember it.

Under Canvas Exit And What Came Next

SPEAKER_03 2:27

And it really, the industry's really exploded over the last 15 years, and it's been really exciting to see. But back in 2009, I think the only other place that had like one or two tents was Claycott up in Clacwot, up in BC. And so we were really kind of the pioneers of this whole movement and of exploring would people pay hotel prices to stay in tents effectively or stay in really unique accommodations, and this idea of creating access to outdoor spaces in in new ways and pioneering sustainable and innovative, unique places to stay outdoors. And thus began the beginning of the outdoor industry. We didn't know it then. I remember the questions I was asking myself back then in in sort of 2009, 2010 was will and will anyone want this? Like, will anyone want to come and stay and pay us, you know, two, three, four hundred dollars a night to sleep in a tent in a field? And of course, you know, I was a little more sophisticated than that, but not much at the beginning. And I still remember being surprised at the demand the sort of the demand that the groundswell of demand there was for outdoor unique product. And uh, I guess that's really why the industry has evolved in the way that it's evolved, because there has been such a demand and a desire to get outside, get outdoors, and experience sleeping in unique places in unique ways.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

I love it. And and are you still involved at all with Under Canvas or have you have you totally?

SPEAKER_03 4:16

Yeah, I know I'm not. I stepped down off the board a few years ago now. They are on their own and doing really well. Um yeah, so uh we sold in 2018 and we stepped down off the board a few years after that.

SPEAKER_01 4:32

Okay, gotcha. And then what have you been focused on since then?

SPEAKER_03 4:36

Yeah, a myriad of things. But one of the things that has surprised me over the last few years was I was not planning on building another travel company. And um I had been growing and scaling under Canvas for about a decade. And as you well know, Connor, this industry is not for the faint of heart. It looks really easy, it looks really sexy, it looks like a wonderful lifestyle, but actually it's pretty tough. Hospitality is a tough business, uh, and then you throw in the outdoors and temporary kind of accommodations in the mix too. We had tents under canvas, so created a whole sort of myriad of challenges for operating a hospitality business that you know doesn't really exist with brick and mortar properties. So I thought when we were sold, when we sold we were done. But one of the things I realized was when you love travel and you love hospitality and you love creating, this industry is really hard to get away from. It's hard to leave it and it's hard to let it go. And so we are now building our second travel company, Few and Far, which I'll tell you all about. I'm sure we'll dig in there. But uh that is now consuming my heart and soul.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

I think this industry is as fun as it is hard.

SPEAKER_03 6:00

Agreed, and that's why so many of us want to be in the space. It's a really, really hard industry, but at the same time, it's really fun, it's really creative, and it's a really nice industry. I mean, when you're a part of this community, you and I met a few months back in Denver at the Glamping Show, American Glamping Show. And it's a really, really cool group of people who are involved in this space. So it's an amazing network, amazing community of people who uh are passionate about this space.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

It is, yeah. Awesome group of people. I mean, you know, tied together, grounded in purpose through the outdoors, or or showing guest hospitality are two good common threads that I think tie everybody together.

SPEAKER_03 6:44

And I and I think the ability to be creative in this space, it's not a one-size fix-all, one product, one way. There's there's so much creativity and so much variation, so many ideas that people can express in this space.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Yeah, sometimes it feels like the market, you know, when you look at it compared to 10 years ago, and it's you might think, oh, it's it's so mature, you know, look at Zion or look at some of these other markets that have you know five to ten pretty established brands there. And it's like, oh, this the market has matured, but but really it's it hasn't. And if you compare it to short-term vacation rental or hotel, or it's it's just still the tip of the spear. And if you still look at the variety of those, you know, say five properties in Zion, like no two of those are really offering the same thing. You know, there might be a little bit of overlap in units here and there, but like by and large, it's a very different experience. And there's a lot of room for people to keep differentiating from one operator to the next.

SPEAKER_03 7:50

Absolutely, and carve their own brand and brand style and price point and target audience. And you're right, we really still are a minute piece of the hospitality industry. And really, only maybe only now is the industry just starting to become more institutionalized from a capital perspective and an investment perspective. And and that's really what enables an industry to grow, right? The the flow of capital into that space. And we're still at the very, very beginning journey of that. So yeah, I mean, I the industry has grown enormously, but it's still a baby.

Capital, Operations And Industry Headwinds

SPEAKER_01 8:35

Hello, listeners. I wanted to share a quick story. I recently started to help a client set up their three properties, two RV resorts and one glamping resort. And they wanted me to help roll out their new tech stack. And at the center of that is the PMS or the property management software. These clients decided to go with storable new book, and thank goodness they did because the property management software is the nucleus of everything that you'll set up: your website, your social media, your bookings, your cleanings, everything. And it really handles the entire process from both the front customer facing side as well as the back end and coordinating cleaners and things like that. So it's, you know, setting up your photos and your pricing and your dynamic pricing and revenue management and your unit information and ensuring a smooth and customizable shopping cart experience to ensure high conversion rate with your customers. And then they have all these great automations. It can send texts and emails to your guests before they arrive on the day they arrived or after to get feedback and reviews. And you can track all your financial performance. And then it also helps with the back end and analyzing your data. I honestly couldn't be happier with the experience. If I call the new book helpline, I get an answer right away with someone who can help me like three or four standing meetings each week with different members of their teams to set up the different capabilities and softwares, or even using them to set up these property websites, or using them for digital marketing services and SEO. And honestly, it has been excellent. I so I chased down storable new book to ask them if they would be sponsors of the podcast because I really believed in their product. Fortunately, they were willing. So they are today's sponsors. So if you're unhappy with your PMS or you're launching a product and shopping, definitely give them a call. They'll give you a free software demonstration. And if you let them know that you came from the Outdoor Hospitality Podcast, they'll give you 15% off your new book signature subscriptions. Can't recommend storable new book highly enough. Go check them out. Thanks. What's your take on institutional appetite in the space? Obviously, a lot of big names have gotten in. I feel like I feel like outdoor hospitality has pulled back a little bit in the last two years, but so is pretty much everybody except for AI. And, you know, there's some there's some very serious roadblocks to development and operations in this industry with you know, just the development of spaced-out units is very hard and expensive from a cost per key. Particularly using Canvas units, you might run into challenges with building code and county jurisdictions and how you don't really have a categorization, which can make development even more difficult. And then from an operations perspective, you know, three main hurdles, which is the highly increased cost per room turnover. If you're in a remote area, the difficulty of staffing, and then just like the the seasonality of each location as far as potentially having really chunky demand. I know it was that way for under Canvas more than maybe any location, any brand. But like I guess as the market has now matured, you've exited and and and looked at it. Like, how do you think with some of those headwinds, I think really strong. Well, I'll let I'll let you answer. What do you think?

SPEAKER_03 11:56

I still think it's way harder than it should be from a from a capital stack perspective. And I have entrepreneurs who reach out to me literally every single week asking for help with getting funding. And my answer is the same over and over and over. You still have to be very creative in this space. You still have to build good relationships with your local bank, you still have to lever equipment financing, you still have to think out of the box. There's no there's no easy sort of one size fits all. This is how you fund a glamping location kind of business model. That still doesn't really exist, and there's still not a lot of capital being deployed into small scale one-off kind of operations. So I I think the capital space is is tough. And that really is an opportunity. I think there's a I think there's a a really great opportunity there. Sort of at the the front end of the market to sort of seed early stage businesses, if you like, to enable them to grow and develop and and that really that is that is still a tough space.

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Is that anything that you're considering doing? Or are you focused on your own thing?

SPEAKER_03 13:15

I definitely have my fingers in other pies, and I'm not really a real estate investor. And really, this is a is a variation on on real estate investing, I think. And so I would love to see more real estate investors take a little bit more risk, maybe for a little bit potential higher return, but that really kind of explore this space and create opportunities for themselves and the founders who are trying to pioneer new locations.

Building Few And Far In South Africa

SPEAKER_01 13:45

Yeah, getting the seed capital for this industry is very tough if you don't if you don't have a big angel investor or have, you know, sitting on some savings oneself or maybe already owned the property. Certainly, it's really hard to get that. So hope hopefully, you know, there are some good strategies, whether it's like SBA loans or you know, you just you kind of have to have a scrappy entrepreneur's take and you find a creative way to do it and go, you know, sell people on the dream, you know, find someone who's really connected to you or your the land or the vision to get going. So can you tell me a little bit more about Quiver Tree and that morphing into few and far and kind of you know that journey and where you where those businesses are at today?

SPEAKER_03 14:33

Yeah. So after we sold Under Canvas, we moved down to South Africa and pioneered venture capital fund to invest in female entrepreneurs across the African continent. I'm a big believer in the fact that small businesses have a lot of power for changing communities, solving problems, really driving the backbone of economies. And I'm passionate about international development. So I started my career working in Africa 27 years ago now. That's a while. And um fell in love with the African continent, and Africa really inspired the business my husband Jake and I built when we built Under Canvas, as we reimagined the safari experience, basically. So we have been down in Africa for the last seven years working with entrepreneurs across the continent, helping them build, grow, and scale businesses. And then for the last few years, the hospitality bug bit us again quite hard. And we fell in love with an extraordinary property up in the very northern corner of South Africa, which is about 100,000 hectares of extraordinary wilderness, and realized it was it was calling to us to help put this location on the map. Uh, and we realized there was an opportunity to go further than we had gone with Under Canvas. And I I often talk about this idea of, you know, for for me, Under Canvas was about building a sustainable company, it was about creating access to the outdoors, it was it was about inviting people into a different way to experience nature. It was about developing and proving that it was possible to develop in a way that you don't have to use enormous amounts of water or power or leave a massive footprint or damage the earth by building on it. But what I have realized over the last five years is that being sustainable isn't the holy grail that I once thought it was. And before everybody tries to shoot me, I now think of sustainability as being like the floor, like the entry point as opposed to the finish line. And we started thinking about what would it look like to build, instead of building a sustainable company, build a regenerative company. And a lot of the work that we were doing with other companies across the continent of Africa was very much looking at how do we help build businesses that create impact, drive change, solve big world problems, affect millions of people's lives. How do we use business as a vehicle to be regenerative in our in our world, both environmentally, socially, and economically? And when we discovered this piece of property quite by accident back in 2021, we realized there was a it was a real extraordinary opportunity to help regenerate a vulnerable community and regenerate thousands of hectares of land that are extraordinary, extraordinary biodiversity. And how do we open up an area of wilderness for people to come and explore and experience and help rewild it, restore it, bring flora and fauna and mega mega herbivores back to it to make it what it once was. So that is what I am now doing. That's my day job. We are pioneering few and far, both from a location perspective and terms of uh we've got an extraordinary lodge set in an amazing wilderness area in South Africa that is being rewilded and restored. And we are also creating and curating extraordinary trips around the world to amazing outdoor places.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

Incredible. I did some research on the location earlier because I've spent some time up in South Africa, and this certainly is a region I've never been to. It is extremely remote as far as distance from any major city. So and I doubt there's a whole lot of hospitality or safari operations in this area. So I think the name Few and Far is apt.

SPEAKER_03 18:56

Yes, exactly. You're not gonna see many people here. You're gonna be one of a few, and you're gonna have gone far from where you came from.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

These I I recommend folks look it up. I'm you know, looking at Few and Far's website for the how do you say it? Levondo. Few and Levondo, L-U-Vondo. She's got some stunning aerial drone shots of the property. It's situated on this kind of forested mountain range, and these units are stunning. They're looks like kind of a hybrid between hardwall and canvas.

SPEAKER_03 19:31

They are. They're a total hybrid, yeah. So they're tent tent-like, but with wooden frames and structures.

unknown 19:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:39

It's amazing. It's kind of, I don't even know how to describe it. Almost looks like a crashing wave a little bit as the structure. How do you describe it?

SPEAKER_03 19:45

Yeah, I think of it a little bit like a shell. They're kind of like a flamshell. Flamshell, yeah, exactly. They're they were kind of designed to sort of connect with the shapes of the mountain. And they sit on a on a cliff edge and look over down into the valley and then up into the mountain beyond. So they're pretty unique.

SPEAKER_01 20:06

I spent some time looking around the unit design, and I really believe that you hit it out of the park again. The uniqueness of the design, doing the hybrid of the soft and hardwall. Really, there's a huge emphasis on the outdoor deck area. So it looks like there's probably more square footage on the deck, maybe, than even on the interior of the unit.

Designing The Cliff Suites And Local Materials

SPEAKER_03 20:25

There is, yeah. We're it's very close. I think it's like about 70 square meters on the inside and 50 on the outside. So it's they're very, it's very close.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

There's a there's a plunge pool. Is there a is there an outdoor shower? Did I see that? Yeah, outdoor shower. Yeah. You use a lot of stunning locally produced products in the interior design and and the architecture, and kind of connecting the stay back to the local area, which I'm a massive fan of, both from the the storytelling as well as the impact on the local community, as well as the you know, lower carbon footprint for getting your products. Well, maybe, sorry, why don't you tell me about the unit and the inspiration and the story behind it?

SPEAKER_03 21:08

Well, one of the things when we first started exploring this idea of building the lodge, you know, other than sort of figuring out where we were going to put it on the mountain, one of the things I realized was that so many African safari lodges were utilizing and importing wood from Brazilian Amazon. Sustainably produced wood from the Amazon, but from the Amazon none nonetheless. And I was like, it's a pretty long way from the Amazon to the bottom of South Africa. And it just it didn't, that didn't make any sense to me. It didn't compute with like, why would you do that when there's so much wood here? And then I we realized that there was sort of a particular hardwood that lasts a long time and and copes with being in um wilderness. Environments in Africa. But we realized that we had a local product, you know, a local, which is actually an invasive species on the mountain, a eucalyptus, and realized that if we heat treated it and manufactured ourselves, we could create a product that basically behaved exactly like Brazilian hardwood. So we spent about a year harvesting wood and working with local sustainable producers of eucalyptus very close to us and using some of our own invasive species from the mountain to harvest those and produce them in our own little factory that we built to produce all of the wood that we ended up using to build our own lodge, which was a monumental achievement. But at the same time, I mean, we created jobs, we had full capabilities then to design. I mean, you have alluded, Connor, that we've got a lot of beams, a lot of curves in our designs. So we're able to manufacture the product that we actually wanted and wanted to use, which was an extraordinary thing, and keep the carbon footprint down to an absolute minimal.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

Very impressive. And I think living up to your own your own reputation to be using finding and devising and creating your own local wood as well as like lumber mill in your backyard to build your units. Do you do you own all of this land outright? How does that part work?

SPEAKER_03 23:25

Yeah, so we have some amazing neighbors. The whole mountain range is about just over 100,000 hectares, which is about just over 250,000 acres, which is larger than Singapore.

SPEAKER_04 23:37

So fairly large area.

SPEAKER_03 23:41

We own about 10,000 acres, and and we utilize the lodge utilizes probably about 30,000 acres for traversing and exploring with our guests. I mean, I mean, and guests barely scratch the surface of the amount of places we can explore in a three or four, four-day time frame. So it's a vast area. But one of the things that we realized as we started meeting people who were involved with the mountain was that there was this land was unprotected, under threat from coal mining, being degraded, and that actually it was home to more biodiversity. The density of the biodiversity was even higher than in the Amazon. So critical habitat for the planet, and yet under serious threat. And so we realized we had connected with land that effectively we were all kind of hoping that one day it might be a national park in its own right. And that, you know, let's put it into protection, let's start removing all the interior fences to open up this vast wilderness area, and let's start restoring it and rewilding the areas that are degraded and protecting the areas that are still pristine so that we don't lose one inch of biodiversity.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

That is incredible that it has the same biodiversity as the Amazon.

Vast Biodiversity And Rewilding Vision

SPEAKER_03 25:06

Is it rainforest or it's a myriad of habitats? So there's some areas of the mountain that are rainforest, there are some areas that are more arid, there's some areas that are more sort of desert-like, and so it's a it's a real mix. It's got like its own microclimate. So we've got on one side of the mountain, you've got a species of yellow woods that only grow in that one particular area, and you've got some mango monkeys that are only found in that particular mountain range. And then on the other side of the mountain where we are, we've got 3,000-year-old baobab trees, which are ginormous. They're like the equivalent of the red woods here in the United States, but they're they're they're fat and round as opposed to tall, and they're just ginormous trees. So the whole area is very, very diverse.

Shari Heilala (Sponsor) 25:56

Hello, listeners. This is Sherry Halala, founder of Sage Outdoor Advisory. If you're launching an outdoor hospitality project like Lamping, we can help. We offer feasibility studies and appraisals. What that means is we look at your specific market and propose business offering and complete an in-depth analysis to make sure that your planned business will be profitable. Getting a second opinion on your proposal in forecasting financials is critical to understand before you spend years of your time and hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is particularly important if you are looking to raise money for your project from a bank of private investors. They are going to want to see this type of deep dive analysis from an independent third-party specialist in the industry. We at Sage have completed well over 250 feasibility studies and appraisals and outdoor hospitality in North America in the last four years so we understand what it takes to bring a project from concept to reality. If this sounds like it could be helpful to you, you can go to our website, SageOutdoorAdvisory.com, and schedule a call with our team. While you're there, check out our proprietary glamping database map too. Thanks. Now back to the show.

SPEAKER_01 26:58

What's what's the like the business model for the property in terms of you know, starting? I'm guessing this is a phase one, and you're well, how many units are exist? When did you start building? And how many units exist today?

SPEAKER_03 27:12

Yeah, we started building in 2023 and started building a road up and over the mountain and manufacturing all the wood that we would need. And then we we we were constructing in earnest throughout 2024, and we finally opened at the very, very end of 2024. We opened on Christmas Eve 2024, so we're just over a year old now, 12, 13, 14 months old now. Um it took us a couple of years to build. But we're we're really small, we are high, high touch, low numbers of guests. So we've got six cliff suites, which means everyone has their own private guide to explore the mountain. So you will never see another group or thousands of other vehicles while you are out. And I was I was on site just last week, and Jake and I were driving to dinner. We had dinner in the bush one night. Jake and I were driving out to go and meet all the rest of our guests and stumbled across a leopard like right there in the middle of the road. And I was like, and there's no one else here. It's just we watched this leopard for about 15 minutes, and she looked at us, and then she crossed the road, and then she led down, and then she looked at us some more, and then she crossed the road again, and and she was completely calm and relaxed and not bothered by us, but not obviously ravaged by 15 other corals trying to pull up and and see her at the same time. So it's an extraordinary place. It's like having your own private, vast wilderness area to explore that's packed with wildlife and giraffes and leopards and rhinos, and I mean, I mean, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

Um there's rhinos on the land?

SPEAKER_03 29:08

Yeah, on the southern, not on our land, but on the southern side of the mountain, there are white rhinos, yes. We we are hoping to reintroduce black rhino in the US term.

SPEAKER_01 29:22

The and to add a little context for the listeners, just from my own personal experience of doing safaris in different areas of Africa, I did the Serengeti and then Numgor and Goro Crater, which are two of the more well-known places, and I went and tourist low season in like February or March, and they were still packed, you know. It feels a little bit more like amusement park than like wild rat a wildlife safari. And yeah, it was obviously still a cool experience, but really, really was kind of weird for me to like, you know, yeah, you go see a lion and there's 15 cars parked around it.

Low-Volume Luxury And Wildlife Encounters

SPEAKER_03 29:57

Yeah, exactly. So it's it's a very, you're right, it's a very unusual phenomenon to be in a wilderness area and and just you to be, you know, just you be there. So we're trying to create sort of like a very pristine, low, low volume, high standard experience that really emphasizes protecting the mountain and at the same time creating very extraordinary experiences that you can't get anywhere else.

SPEAKER_01 30:23

Who is your target customer and what kind of nightly rates are we talking about?

SPEAKER_03 30:28

Yeah, well, funny you should ask. We are twelve hundred dollars per person per night, which actually for the for the created experience that it is, is it's very reasonable from an African perspective. And that's fully inclusive with private guides, all your meals, sleeping out under the stars, extraordinary wildlife viewings, hiking, biking, swimming in waterfalls. I mean, you name it, you can do it. So that's where we're at. But and was one of the things we pyred at uh pioneered at under canvas was this idea that I don't believe the outdoors is for the 1% only. I don't believe that that we have to limit those with a big fact checkbook to being able to experience some of the world's most extraordinary places. So we have uh since sort of the middle of last year, um, we have a nature has no nature has no price tag campaign, which allows anyone to fill out an application form and tell us why they would like to come. Yes, yes, and I review those on a weekly basis, and you know, we are not no resort is ever 100% full, 365 days of the year. There is always capacity for unused rooms, and so we allow a proportion of our rooms to go to people at a price that they tell us they can afford. And so people effectively pay what they can to come and experience this extraordinary place.

SPEAKER_01 32:13

I yes, you read my you read my mind. And it how does it work for dates that they can do that?

SPEAKER_03 32:21

Or yeah, so basically, people make us their offer. It's a bit like you know, when you bid for an upgrade on an airline or something, you know, you're you say this is what I'm prepared to pay, and you say, you know, this when you would like to come and the the price that you can pay, and and we look at those dates and go, does that work for us? Does that does that price point work for us? Can we navigate that? Do we have genius? And um, and I try and say yes as much as I humanly possibly can. I think we had uh how much did we do last year?

SPEAKER_01 32:57

How much notice do you give them?

SPEAKER_03 33:00

Oh well, that the traveler. Yeah, I mean we we can handle short notice, obviously, but depending on where the traveler's coming from, they they often need a little bit longer in time. But yeah, I mean we did over a hundred, we we accepted over a hundred offers last year for people wanting to come and stay with us through that campaign.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

God, that is what a beautifully done integration. So I had a similar idea because I I kind of run into the same conundrum as you, where obviously the most profitable business is always gonna be usually gonna be in the luxury sector and really catering to the 1%. It's much easier to run a profitable business that way. But then you run into this conscious issue where you don't want to make these experiences inaccessible to certain groups.

SPEAKER_04 33:52

Absolutely.

Pricing And “Nature Has No Price Tag”

SPEAKER_01 33:53

And the way I'd always imagined it, the solution that I was gonna do in my head with my future resort was first weekend of the month or Tuesdays, or where like a certain period would be, you know, something you might call locals only, or you know, folks could apply to come and stay on those dates to come stay at cost. But the way that you are doing it is much better because it allows you to be kind of more nimble and almost integrate it into revenue management, where you can let people know, you can look at your calendar and say, you know, utilize empty rooms to so at least people are paying something and you're also able to like not waste a room. There's so it's just like a beautiful way to work to get both things.

SPEAKER_03 34:40

And those guests become extraordinary brand advocates, right? With you know, being willing to tell your story wherever they've gone and you know, share with their network and their friends. And I think there's something very powerful about not limiting access to extraordinary places. I I think nature is for all of us, and and and actually it's gonna take all of us to care for our planet and to move the needle on some of the big issues that our planet is is facing. And I know, and you know, Connor, that when we experience the outdoors and we get outside, we're so much more likely to care for the planet and be mindful about the things that impact our planet if you've experienced it and if you've fallen in love with it. And um, and that's that's the magic, that's the sort of the symbiotic magic. It's gonna take all of us at all of our price points. You know, I say to our guests all the time, if you can pay more than I'm charging, please do. Like if you can help us invest in the conservation work that we are doing and you can afford to pay more, please do. Because, you know, this is nature has no price tag, but nature is actually priceless. But the price tag of actually looking after nature is extreme. It's it's it's a very, very high bar. We'll spend over a million dollars a year on managing landscapes and rehabilitating land. And I can spend even more than that if I'm if I'm reintroducing wildlife and managing wildlife. So really, I mean, it's it's it's a big it's a big it's a big impact.

SPEAKER_01 36:32

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to be done. There's a lot of work to do, and that takes money. What what is is Few and Far a nonprofit or a for-profit?

SPEAKER_03 36:40

We are a for-profit organization, but we're just setting up our our non-profit profit arm to also enable people to help invest in specific projects that we've got on the reserve to to help us preserve and protect. So we're just in the process of doing that. But yeah, we are a for-profit organization.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

Whenever people, going back to what you were mentioning earlier, like whenever people ask, or I'll just share on my own accord, is like my why for being in the glamping or outdoor hospitality space, is that I believe that glamping makes the outdoors more accessible to a demographic that has likely not connected with nature in a meaningful way. And by showing people a wonderful experience in nature, you're thus inspiring and you're thus fostering more environmental stewardship. And that's something that I've always believed. Every once in a while, like I have some doubts on that. I'm like, is that is that really moving the needle? Is it doing enough? And I'd be curious, like, as someone who did that under Canvas, like what's of your opinion on that?

Access, Inclusion And Educating Through Comfort

SPEAKER_03 37:48

Well, I I know I got 10 years of, I don't know, 15 years of data that says we know that whole demographics of people now will experience the outdoors when they wouldn't have experienced it before. And I'll tell you a funny story because in my naivety in my early days of under canvas, I had not clicked, and this may sound very obvious and very blonde, but I had not clicked that camping was a white phenomenon, like racially, um, that camping is a white man's endeavor. And I had I I spent my early career in Zimbabwe, in Africa, and my host family that I lived with came uh moved to Canada a decade or so ago, and I invited them to come down and stay with us at our glacier camp just south of the Canadian border in Montana, and and said, come and stay at our amazing new camp. And the husband of the family, he took me aside and he said, Sarah, I have to tell you this, but black people don't camp. And I was like, What are you talking about? Why not? And I said, Well, you must, and I insisted. They came on down and then he said to me, Okay, Sarah, black people still don't camp, but this isn't camping. This is this is something completely different, and I can do this. And it was it was like a light bulb moment for me that was like, oh, we can be a bridge. We can be a bridge between two worlds. And to be fair, I am a white woman who does also not want to camp and does not want to sleep on the ground and you know, like have to go potty in the woods. I don't want to do that either. But you know, that's when I realized clamping is a bridge, it's a bridge for people who who would never think of going camping. And and to be fair, there's a whole demographic of white people who would not even think of going camping either. But culturally, you know, there's a subsect of people who love to camp, right? And who get the outdoors and who love it. But there's a whole swath of people who don't. Um, but yet being exposed to it in a comfortable way, you've got your meals served, you've got plush beds, running waters, showers, flushing toilets, and you can sit around a fire pit at night and see the stars and sit in silence because there's no noise. Like, and you can watch, you know, wildlife and see trees and smell the air and like like go for walks. I mean, then people get it. Then people understand it. And I I know in the early days of under canvas too, we well, and still with under canvas, we have pool chain showers in the in the shower, and that is a way to limit water usage. And we nicknamed a whole bunch of water saving activities that we have at Under Canvas as intentional inconveniences because it's definitely an inconvenience to have to pull a lever to get the water to run to take a shower. And people said to me at the time, you will not get away with that. People will not buy that, they will not be happy spending several hundred dollars a night on your tent and have to pull a lever to get the water to run in the shower. And I said, Well, I'm gonna do it anyway, because I want people to be in convenience and I want to teach people about water conservation. I want, we had many camps in the desert, we have very limited amounts of water. I said, it is absolutely essential. This is the only way we can build a hotel here if we use minimal amounts of water. And under canvas resorts still typically use about a tenth of the water of a same-size hotel, a regular hotel. And I started to realize this is a way for us to educate and communicate and show our guests you can still have a wonderful lavish experience without having to use gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of water. And so, you know, for me, this industry can take people out of their comfort zones, it can allow people to fall in love with the outdoors, it can also allow us to educate and teach and communicate at things that you know you wouldn't necessarily be exposed to in any other way, certainly wouldn't be exposed to in a regular hotel. But here we are doing something different. We're all out of our comfort zone ever so slightly. And here's an opportunity to tell stories about water. In Moab in the desert, there's cryptobiotic soil. Like there's like a like a thin crust on top of the soil that if you step on it, it's like a microorganism. And if you step on it, you kill it. And that microorganism is thousands of years old. This is an opportunity to teach about like why that that microorganism is so critical for keeping the sand and the soil in place so that we don't just have one massive sandstorm day after day. Like nature has been doing its work for thousands of years, and and it's our job to understand it and learn from it and protect it and care from it. And I I think this industry is a huge opportunity for for doing that and for crossing borders and allowing people to experience things and learn things they would never have known otherwise.

SPEAKER_01 43:34

And it's a whole it's ironic that now, in my opinion, the future of travel is people getting back to experience nature in a way we did 500 years ago.

unknown 43:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 43:49

And it's ironic, right? It's ironic that we we want to go back to doing primitive things. And I I agree, I I think our technological World drives us actually to want to disconnect and to want to do something that's so primitive and so basic and connect to an outdoor world that wants us to breathe, wants us to rest, wants us to experience it in a completely different way.

SPEAKER_01 44:19

Do you have Wi-Fi at the property or no?

SPEAKER_03 44:22

In our South Africa property, we do. Yeah, because there's very little, there's no phone signal. And we know when people are a long way from home and they're in the middle of the wilderness, having no signal whatsoever is and very unnerving for people. We start to see the left eye start to twitch, you know, if you can't get online.

SPEAKER_01 44:40

Is it is it available in the units or in like the the just in the central area?

SPEAKER_03 44:46

In the central area, and we most recently put it in the units so that actually the guests could also communicate easily with the staff on WhatsApp, and it was easier to manage service that way. But people, it's it's slow internet, it's not, you know, it's not super fast, it's not, you know, it's not like streaming, streamingable. But it, you know, you can you can send messages and emails and you know contact people.

SPEAKER_01 45:13

How's demand been in the first year? And how are you getting the word out from like a marketing and advertising perspective? Because obviously you're creating demand. I'm guessing you would know this market better than me, but I'm guessing you're creating demand in the middle of nowhere, which is always a tough, uh, a hard, a hard battle.

Regeneration, Carbon And Managing Landscapes

SPEAKER_03 45:31

Yeah, it is tougher. And you know, and that's one of the reasons Ender Camus was so successful is we picked high traffic destinations. And I'm going against all my advice that I've ever believed. So it's slow, it's definitely slower. You know, building, we not only have to build a reputation as a brand, we have to build the reputation of the destination also. So that takes time. But one of the things I have realized about the African safari market, it's been really interesting, sort of to me, coming back to the home of glamping, if you like, you know, the birthplace.

SPEAKER_01 46:08

The cradle of man and the cradle of glamping.

SPEAKER_03 46:11

Yeah, exactly. It's kind of the genesis of all of it. But one of the things I've realized is that the African safari experience largely hasn't evolved or changed for decades and decades and decades. And one of the things we wanted to do was evolve it and move it on and reimagine it again, just like we reimagined it originally for under canvas. How do we reimagine it again in the home of safari? And one of the things I know that is really, really important is just creating extraordinary experiences and giving people an opportunity to be active. And one of the hard parts about being on Safari is you get trapped in a vehicle for many, many hours just trying to find wildlife. And so we don't do that. We are lucky enough to allow our guests to walk, to hike, to bike, to swim in waterfalls, to sleep out under the stars, to go on game drives, yes, but but do so many other things at the same time. So I very much believe what we are creating in the Sopensburg Mountains is an adventure travel slash safari experience, which is a very unusual thing actually to experience in Africa. So that's a very, I think it's a very unique proposition. And if you like being active at all and you like wildlife, then we are an extraordinary place to come.

SPEAKER_01 47:34

I 1000% see the value, and I think you're on the verge of getting an avalanche of demand. I imagine that this is a PR dream in the sense that, you know, and social media, but just like, I don't know, you're you're focused on the product and the experience, and that will do the heavy lifting in the end. But I'm not surprised that it's a little bit of a slower ramp than being outside of the Grand Canyon.

SPEAKER_03 48:00

And it's a long way, right? It's a long way to travel from the United States, it's a long way from Europe to travel to Africa. So it's a big long haul, um, long haul trip.

SPEAKER_01 48:10

Well, I I'm gonna be super curious to check in in a year from now and see how things are going. But I would imagine that you are well positioned at where the industry and you know human human travel preferences headed, I think perfectly.

SPEAKER_05 48:27

So I definitely a little ahead of my time, Connor. So it's takes the universe a little bit to catch up to me.

SPEAKER_01 48:35

I'm giving it a full buy rating. Invest, invest.

SPEAKER_03 48:39

Yeah, well, in 10 years' time, everybody will have built resorts like we're building now. But yeah, we're we're at the front front end of that again and and really creating a very differentiated product. But what I know to be true for travelers worldwide is that we are obsessed now with having experiences and that we're we're gonna spend more money on experiences than we are on anything else in our lives. And we are even seeing it, you know, I mean, part from the fact that homeownership is now very difficult to achieve, we're seeing the uh a younger generation being more interested in travel and having experiences than they are in in acquiring assets. So I do believe experiences are the new assets, and um, I know even just as a mom of two teenage boys now that I value making memories and I always have valued making memories with my kids more than anything else. And that's what we're about. We're about creating extraordinary experiences in wild places.

SPEAKER_01 49:44

Yeah, and the one of one, the one of one experiences that are irreplicable. And I think what you're creating there, as far as the land, as far as the experiences with the well, not only the the opportunities for safari and game drive, but also mountain biking and things like that, which is very unique, and down to the units, is all highly unique. And that's always something that you've been very good at. And you built and designed all your own units at Under Canvas, right? Yeah, and now you're doing that again. What what what is as you've launched into Feunfar, what is the same as Under Canvas and what is what is decidedly different about how you're approaching it this this time or with with this brand, or you know, either from like a like a business, you know, business model standpoint and also from a guest experience standpoint?

SPEAKER_03 50:38

Well, the most obvious thing is that I we very intentionally built a four-star brand with Under Canvas. Now we're very intentionally building a five-star brand, and I'm very interested in creating gastronomic experiences, active experiences, wildlife experiences. But you're right, what's the the design focus is the same? Our philosophies have just evolved, as I said, sort of from where we left off. So this sort of like the next iteration of our own thinking about sustainability and local and being regenerative, that is all an evolution from where we've been in the past. And thinking long term, this is this is the other sort of new thing for me. We weren't ever actively land managing with under canvas. We were we were taking raw wild landscapes and trying to do them no harm effectively by not you know creating a massive footprint on them, trying to leave no trace as much as possible. But now I'm actively thinking long-term about managing and protecting wild spaces and how we utilize hospitality as an asset and a way to do that. And so we're navigating carbon carbon projects and restoration projects and wild habitat restoration and rewilding. And so all of that is sort of another sort of next iteration of what we're doing now that we've not done before.

SPEAKER_01 52:22

Well, what could you tell me a little bit more about what that looks like as far as the carbon sequestering and the rejuvenation of the land? I know you mentioned cutting down, cutting down fences to reintroduce, you know, big big herbivore migration. What else?

Funding, The Three Ps And Long-Term Balance

SPEAKER_03 52:35

It means actively managing the land to sequester carbon. So what I have learned in the last year, and I am not, I would not consider my scientistself a scientist by any stretch of the margin, but what I have learned is our soil has so much power. And that we have a 20 billion ton excess carbon problem in our atmosphere, and that actually we need to do everything we can to sequester, like pull down more carbon from our atmosphere and trap it in our soil. Nature is extraordinary in that nature has all the capabilities to sequester all the carbon that we will ever need to sequester. Nature can do it all. Nature just needs a helping hand to be able to do it all. And what we've discovered from the land that we are now actively managing is that after scientific research, some of it is considered in pristine condition and some of it's considered in highly degraded condition. And what that means, whilst it still might look wild, it might mean that nature's out of whack. So it might mean we've got invasive species that have taken over, or you've got like one species that is dominating and blocking out a whole variety of other species. So maybe that's killed off the grass or killed off a certain type of flora and fauna that should be in that spot. So what it means is we're actively trying to restore grasslands, actively trying to nurture the soil to enable it to capture more carbon, restore sort of microorganisms, and bring back things that should be there and take things away that shouldn't be there and allow it to become its wild, pristine state. And that actually requires management. And any land that's been disturbed by man in any way will require management to bring it back to how it actually should be. And if we can do that and we can nurture the soil, we can sequester more carbon and capture it in the soil and solve some of our big climate problems.

SPEAKER_01 54:53

Ah, I love it. Thinking very big too. Small and big.

SPEAKER_03 54:58

Small and big all at the same time. And that's and that's the same with sort of short and long all at the same time. It's like, what do we do today that's going to have an impact for a hundred years from now? You know, what happens if we do this? And you know, what does that mean for generations to come?

SPEAKER_01 55:16

How did you fund View and Far? Is it is it did you take investor money, banks self-funded?

SPEAKER_03 55:30

Yeah, we've got a little bit of bank funding too, but yeah, largely all self-funded.

SPEAKER_01 55:36

Amazing. Good for you. How are you how do you balance the needs of the land with profitability or potentially like well, maybe I'll start by what is your plan for the property? Is there a long-term vision in terms of unit count or amenities or like revenue or anything like that? What's the future look like for that, for the Levando property?

SPEAKER_03 56:03

Yeah, I I think about three Ps, which for me are people, planet, and profit. And they're like having three legs of a stool. And if one leg is out of whack, you're gonna fall over. And I and I think really healthy, productive businesses have to think about profit. They have to, you know, if you don't build a profitable business, you're not gonna last very long, right? So they're not they're not sustainable. So you have to you have to have some profit in the mix, but you also have to have people in the mix, the stakeholders, whether that's local, your local communities, your employees, your shareholders, your guests, guests are stakeholders too, right? And then the planet. How how are we investing in the planet through this business? Like what are we doing to sustain our our world? So I think about those three legs, and I think about you know, keeping them in balance is hard, but that's that's the challenge if we don't want to fall over. I think all three of those things have to be navigated and managed accordingly for a business to I think that's I think that's a sign of a business, a real business succeeding.

SPEAKER_01 57:17

Very succinctly articulated. I think there's all these different components. I feel like you and I sh share a lot of the same values and vision for this industry and properties that are like this. And then there's all these ideas that I've been kind of marinating on and mulling around in my head for years. And then to hear you articulate them, I'm like, oh yeah, that that's a way better way to put it. Yeah, the three Ps. Yeah, the three Ps.

SPEAKER_05 57:42

I I I I tell you, Kana, I'm a simple fan of gal.

SPEAKER_03 57:46

And so I I need it in sort of bite-sized, easy chunks and an easy way for me to think about it. And if I can think about it in an easy way, the chances are then maybe I can make it happen. And I think sometimes that's the hard part when we think about, oh, we've got to do all these big initiatives and we've got to drive change, and we've got to, we've got to do this, and we've got to do this. Like it can all be a bit much, right? But actually, if we can boil it down to sort of some very simple principles, then I think it's easier to execute on.

SPEAKER_01 58:21

The and what did you call the program as far as the making this the units more accessible for like a application price point? What do you call that?

SPEAKER_03 58:30

Oh, the nature has no price tag campaign.

SPEAKER_01 58:32

Nature has no price tag. Yeah. Another great, another great implementation of that awesome idea. That's a huge win-win. And I was gonna ask you how do you strike the balance between you know profit and planet in terms of you know making financial choices and looking to the future? And I I might kind of guess your answer, and and that is like you you find ways that are that are win-win that are good for both, which kind of ties into how you the places have no boundaries or the the the the low-income thing, it's like, hey, we're we're making this more accessible while also filling rooms. And so, anyways, didn't mean to answer for you, but uh how's that journey, the balancing that?

SPEAKER_03 59:18

That's that that's it in a nutshell, really. And and obviously, we all know for those of us who are in this industry, when you open a property, it's not profitable on day one. I mean, that would be a miracle. That's not normal. So so we know that when you're open when you start something from scratch, you're on a journey, you're on a ramping journey of growing and scaling something, and you know, and how long something takes is you know, can can be more or less challenging depending on your demand. But I think about those those same things with people on planet too, right? If my my profitability is gonna take time, my planet work is gonna take time, and my people work is gonna take time, but I'm gonna set the the bar of where I'm going and work towards that. And Rome's never built in a day. But if I'm allowing all those all those things to be things that I'm actively working on all at the same time, and I can't leave one leg behind, they've all kind of got to be growing and moving forward, then that's kind of how I think about it. I I don't agree with well, we'll and this is this is what a lot of businesses can do, right? It's like say, well, when we're profitable, we'll we'll give some of our funds away, or we'll do X, Y, and Z that's good. But actually, it's really hard to retrofit something, right? If you are exploitative or you, you know, you make bad decisions all along the way, it's really hard to then just turn that around with one good decision, right? So you so you have to kind of, you know, the same with people, right? We have to we have to build culture and build ways of being for our stakeholders, employees, guests, shareholders, communities. We have to build that in from the beginning. And if you build it in from the beginning, it's a whole lot easier to do than if you try and kind of think about patching it on later. That's hard, that's much harder.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:22

Yeah, and it's and I love that take. And it doesn't have to be a choice between one or the other, like maybe thinking your your tripod and metaphors, a really good comparison with the Venn diagram, where it's like you have people, people, places, people, profit, planet, and finding, you know, how to run a business that is in that central area that overlaps and serves all three, which looks like you're executing beautifully on so far at at few and far.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:51

Profit's definitely lagging.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:54

Takes time.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:55

It takes time. Yeah, exactly. It all takes time.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:58

What is I think doing things very intentionally and thoughtfully to start, like you have that slower ramp, but I think you make that up on the back end or in the long term when competition tries to come in and you it's harder to reproduce.

Few And Far Travel: Curated Adventures

SPEAKER_03 1:02:14

That's exactly it. And I and I do think that businesses with really strong values at the heart have the potential for creating so much more value and for going a distance, right? Being able to stand up to macro and micro events that happen that we can't things that we can't control. But it's it's the you know, the the robust businesses that have got backbone to them that are much more likely to be able to stand up to scrutiny and stand up to competition. And I I think one of the the reasons I used to be very worried about competition when I was building under canvas, I used to, I used to stress about it a lot. And you know, and part of that was well, we're first, and so like there's like everybody's coming for us. But what I realized eventually was that actually everyone else coming into the space was helping build the industry. And actually, if this if my business was ever gonna be a thing, uh I'm gonna need everybody else in the space investing in money and marketing and clamping, and that one advert for a glamp site is an advert for all glamp sites, right? And so, you know, there's this there's this holistic thinking and shape-shifting thinking that says, you know, I'm not I'm not just building this one tiny little thing here. What I'm trying to do is a much bigger thing. And when we think bigger, I genuinely think that helps us be more robust in so many ways.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:55

What's the future of Levondo look like? What's your in terms of like future design, what does that look like?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:02

Yeah. Well, we're we're planning that by 2030 we're trying to get all 100,000 hectares into designated nature reserve with as many internal fences down inside as possible. And the more land we can open up, then it it creates more possibilities for creating new camps. We'll probably expand the little camp that we've got here that we've built here first just a little bit, probably add another sort of two or three units on our first location, and then replicate building another little lodge in a different area around the mountain because you can only get so far in a few hours every time you go out and explore. So that's what we're thinking. Wonder there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:44

Is there a minimum night stay out there currently?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:48

We uh two only, but that's really only for practical reasons that it takes a while to get to us. So it's not really.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:56

It seems like a V Yeah. How long to drive from the nearest major airport?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:00

We pick people up from a commercial airport about an hour and a half away. So we're a quick 40-minute flight from Johannesburg up to Polakwani, and we pick people up from there, and that's about 90 minutes. So it's not bad.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:13

I thought it was Pretoria, and I figured that was like six, eight hours drive.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:17

It's about five hours to Pretoria. Yeah, it's about a five-hour drive. Yeah.

unknown 1:05:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:22

Okay, good. I'm glad there's a more of a little regional airport.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:25

There's a little regional airport, yeah. So people do a quick hop up and we come and get them.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:29

Yeah. So maybe we could take a moment to talk about few and far travel, which is maybe you could tell us about that.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:37

Yeah. Well, one of the things I realized as we were sort of building the lodge was I'm really obsessed by creating experiences. And I love I love travel. I absolutely love it with everything in me. And I put together a collection of places around the world, of partner sort of organizations. Of people with the same values as us, sort of creating extraordinary outdoor experiences. And I wanted to create a way for people to travel with us with going on adventures around the world in a very mindful way, connecting with independent operators who were crafting extraordinary experiences in their corner of the world. So that's what we do. We curate experiences, you know, one of a kind, custom experiences for groups and individuals to travel around the world with us and explore extraordinary places all over the place with the same ethos of trying to protect the planet, have extraordinary experiences, experience beautiful places, and learn about cultures and wildlife in that particular place. So that's what we do with our with our travel company is take people on journeys around the world.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:01

And how do you how does that how do you make money off that? Or like how does that from a business mechanics and partnership standpoint?

SPEAKER_03 1:07:08

Yeah, it's really simple actually, in that all hotels usually grant agents commission. So if I am booking our guests into an experience at a different hotel, say in Peru, I'm gonna book with that provider, our guests with that provider, and they're gonna give me, they're gonna give me commission for bringing my guests to stay with them. So just like you know, you give 15-20% away to Expedia or Booking.com or Airbnb, a travel agent tour operator usually gets 15-20% from the accommodations that they book for their client. And we just piece all those together. So it doesn't cost the client anymore, and that the hotel pays us commission on bringing guests to them.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:56

And you get to go out and try all these experiences firsthand before.

Favourite Journeys And Independent Hotels

SPEAKER_05 1:07:59

I get to go and try them all. Yes, I do, which is a particular privilege.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:04

I've got so many amazing friends now around the world who've got extraordinary, extraordinary properties, and I just love opening the window for people to experience. I I I mean, for me, independently owned is perfection because you've got soul, you've got curated experiences, you've got boutique properties that that have an identity all of their own. And so we love we love sort of taking people to places they and to stay with sort of small hotels that they may never have heard of. But I love I love food. I'm a big foodie, so food's a big piece of our journey. So we love we love Relais Chateau properties for that for that reason, and they're all independently owned boutique hotels, usually in extraordinary outdoor destinations with amazing food. So um, we our own hotel just became part of that collection this last year. So we level that network quite a lot. But yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:06

I might have to introduce you to some a friend of the podcast who came on who's got an unreal property of I think it's like seven, eight hundred acres organic sheep farm in New Zealand, doing an incredible concept of a landscape resort there. Is that and it's is that something you want to intro on?

SPEAKER_03 1:09:26

Yeah, totally up my street. Absolutely. Yeah, we're always looking for really unique places in extraordinary parts of the world to share with our guests, our travelers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:37

What's what's maybe your favorite experience that you've gotten? And there's some insane ones listed on the website, the few and far traveled.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:44

All of those trips I have been privileged to be able to do, and they they all made the grade because, and that's why they're on the list. But yeah, there is some amazing places around the world. I I I mean, other than I'm a bit biased towards Africa, obviously, and Africa is extraordinary because of her, you know, her amazing wildlife. Uh, and there's nowhere really in the world like Africa for wildlife. But one of my very top favorite, completely different experiences was cruising the Amazon on a riverboat. My son took my my 12-year-old son at the time, he's a bit older now, but maybe 11, 12. I took he and I went on an adventure to Peru, and we swam with pink dolphins, we fished for piranhas, he had tarantulas crawling up his shoulder, we trekked through the jungle, we swung through the trees, we watched sloth, we ate extraordinary Peruvian food, and he and I just made memories every single day, and we mudbathed in the river in one spot. I mean, we did so many cool things, and that trip was and that trip's on our website too. I mean, it's it was like it's you know, the automy of can we create sort of multi-generational experiences, learn about cultures, learn about the destruction of the Amazon, learn about what we're doing to preserve these places, meet the communities that live on the banks of the river, learn how they live, learn what life's like, expose ourselves, buy their buy their products that they're their handicrafts that they're making, support their communities, and and have an amazing time. And I that for me is kind of the that's the magic of the trips that we we curate and we send people on. And that probably from one of my all-time favorites outside of of being in Africa.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:49

How do you manage your time between both pretty massive undertakings in and of themselves, few and far travel and few and far in the Levondo? How do you balance that? Is one taking more or less? Is one providing more income than the other?

SPEAKER_03 1:12:06

Well, I I am traveling an inordinate amount of time of the time. I just got back from South Africa a couple of days ago, and I'm not really sleeping through the night at the moment.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:16

So that helps get a lot done when you learn sleeping.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:20

With little sleep from a articulation standpoint.

Teams, Grit And Staying In The Ring

SPEAKER_03 1:12:24

So that's not so great. Um I I don't know how to answer that, Connor, other than to say I have always had to build extraordinary teams around me to help execute on the things that I'm trying to do. And none of these things are things that I can pull off all by myself. They require, they require very talented people who care about the same things I care about, who are highly motivated, who are able to work with very limited supervision, because I just don't have time to supervise anybody, and who are on the sort of, you know, bought in with our vision of this is what we're trying to do, this is what we're trying to grow, this is what we're trying to build. And uh and so I very heavily rely on great people around me to make things happen.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:19

What's the biggest challenge either of those at at both those businesses?

SPEAKER_03 1:13:25

I there's there are so many challenges.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:30

It's not easy.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:31

No, it's really not easy, and I would love it if it was easy. I really, really would love it if it was easy. Um, I was writing in my journal just this morning about the pain and discomfort of having to push through things that are complex. And it reminded me of a time in my early days in my under canvas journey that sometimes when things just get really hard, you just want to quit, right? The instinct to just give up when things are hard is quite high. And and it's still, I will say this out loud, it is still high for me now. And it doesn't that doesn't get any easier actually, because in some ways you can lull yourself into a weird sense of well, I've built a successful business before. This should be easy for this to be successful, and it just doesn't work like that. Um still have to go back to the beginning of the journey and start from scratch all over again and fight the good fight like you had to fight it from the beginning the last time you fought this good fight. And I, you know, I've done a lot of work with entrepreneurs over the last six, seven years, and I have said so many times, and I and I'm now finding myself saying it to myself again, that he or she who can stay in the ring longer than anyone else is the winner, right? Like that this really is a game of having courage to stay in the ring, and it's really hard sometimes to stay in the ring when the lions are coming for you and the gladiators are coming for you, and like you know, you feel like everyone's trying to kill you whichever way you turn, and and the bank account doesn't look very healthy, and you know, and you just think, well, this is all this is all a bit too much. It's really easy to just want to quit. And so I I do think one of the hardest things is holding your nerve when things are challenging and tough. Like going the distance, like it's a thing, like persevering when you are in distress and when it doesn't look that you know, everything doesn't look great and nothing's working out, and you have to pivot again. That that's it's just normal. And the hard part is having the staying power and the grip to be able to navigate the discomfort over and over and over and over again, and not you know, not expecting it to be a piece of cake, not being surprised when it's hard. Um I I think I think that's the most challenging thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:23

Yeah, and it's funny, I would imagine that even when under Canvas was at eight locations, most of that which were somewhat stabilized, you know, it's it's still hard. You're just solving bigger problems.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:37

You're just solving different problems. I mean, that's the thing. You're you're just you're you're evolving new problems, and you know, there's always some massive threat that could come and wipe you out. And you know, it's it's scary stuff. And you know, for us when we're building under canvas, we we bootstrapped under canvas for a very, very long time. So we lived on a knife edge really financially for for almost a decade, you know, and any one thing, any moment in time could have literally just taken us down.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:08

And that's that's you know, the the good it's there's a lot of trauma and and late nights. But the one, you know, because it's so hard in high stakes, you know, from a livelihood perspective, like you're if it was bored, sorry, if it was easy, it would be boring. And if it was boring, you wouldn't be engaged. And if you weren't engaged, you wouldn't be loving it. Yeah. So it's this weird paradox.

AI As A Tool, Not A Substitute

SPEAKER_03 1:17:41

It is a really weird paradox. And I I do often think that entrepreneurs we are a strange bunch of entrepreneurs, people who want to do this for fun are are slightly diverse. But that's I think that's the the joy of creating things, right? I mean, whether you're an artist or a writer or you know, an entrepreneur, when we're in the business of creating things, you know, there's there's there's a lot of risk involved, but there's also a lot of magic involved, and things can go well and things can go bad, and often it's both, right? And having to navigate the the highs and the lows and navigate that mentally and emotionally, I think it's one of the hardest things about this journey.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:29

Yeah, it's like who, you know, like you said, it's a war of attrition. Or who can stay in the in the arena of the ring the longest?

SPEAKER_03 1:18:36

Who can stay? Yeah, who's got the staying power to stay and navigate it through? And I think those die don't die. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's the hunger games out there. Don't die. Um, everybody's coming for you. Just stay alive.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:52

Oh man, it's tough.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:54

How are you using or taking advantage of AI in your businesses? And I guess when do you think it should be used? And are there any instances where it should not be used?

SPEAKER_03 1:19:06

I haven't found an instant where it should not be used yet. But I guess I guess I would say on that front, I I still think we all want human interaction. I I can tell when I'm talking to a robot, I can tell when I'm talking to a chatbot, I can tell when someone's giving me pat answers, and I don't want any of that. But I I I want human interaction, I want to talk to human people, I want to engage with real answers in real time with real solutions. Um, but at the same time, I love this idea of being understood as a customer better because of what AI can teach us. Like I want to be cured, I want things to be curated for me because of what you know about, like what AI can know about me. I I want to create experiences for people that really like absolutely blow them away because of what I can know about them through AI, and that can help me develop experiences and develop material and information that resonates in a really, really strong way. So I I am using AI as a tool to speed me up on almost everything, but I am not allowing it to be the final word yet. I still think it's a tool to enhance us. It's I don't think of it as a tool to do everything for us. I don't want to use it as a tool to do everything for us. I think when we do that, we lose the the je ne sais quoi of human interaction. And particularly in hospitality, that's where the magic lies. So I I don't want to lose that. But I do want to use it as a tool to make me smarter, faster, not waste time on things I don't need to waste time on and and to help lever, you know, lever knowledge, power, insights to our advantage.

Big Goals: Carbon, Landscapes And Leadership

SPEAKER_01 1:21:39

What what is what's what's next? What are next steps for few and far? Travel and few and far. Levando, and then are you looking to do more locations for yes, I am.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:53

Yeah. Yeah, I mean obviously we're trying to build our travel brand uh as a trusted brand in the market in a very sort of niche space, but I want to do large landscape work around the world. I want to, I said to my son when we first sort of started working on our carbon project in South Africa, I said, we're trying to sequester like a hundred thousand tons of carbon a year from this one project. And I said, So mum and dad have decided we'd love to do enough projects to to be sequestering like a million tons of carbon a year from all the all the projects that we do. And he looked at me, he's 17 now. And this was a couple of years ago. But he said, Is that it?

SPEAKER_04 1:22:41

And I was like, buddy, that's gonna be really hard to try and pull all that off.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:46

That's gonna be really, really challenging. But I loved the question because in his mind, you know, we've got this urgent climate crisis on our doorstep, and a million tons whilst being a large number for one individual to be taking on themselves is not enough. And I I love the way he was thinking and saying, you know, pushing the boundary to say, is that as big as you can think, mom? Is that all you've got? And I was like, well, okay, maybe it isn't. Maybe there's more in the tank there. I don't know. So, you know, I mean, the vision really would be I would like to not be the only hospitality entity in the world doing large-scale landscape carbon initiatives. And we are right now. We are the only hospitality entity in the world tackling large-scale carbon initiatives at the same time as being a hospitality entity. I shouldn't be the only woman in the world doing that. So again, I hope we I hope we lead. We're pioneers, and I but I hope other people will want to compete with that vision and that desire and take on that challenge in the same way. I hope we will inspire others to to do more. You know, I hope we stop talking about plastic straws and we start talking about carbon and zero waste and you know, net positive as opposed to just neutral. And I hope all that language starts to become much more normal for hospitality entities, particularly the outdoor hospitality space, because we are the best position for doing that work.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:39

Inspiring stuff. No settling.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:42

No settling. My bank account would definitely like me to settle.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:46

Let's just say that out loud.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:49

What I what I've learned is it doesn't really matter what is in my bank account because my dreams are always seem to be bigger than we can afford. And I actually think that's a really good, healthy place to be. It means we're we're we're dreaming, we're pushing ourselves, and we're taking on challenges bigger than ourselves. And when we do that, I think we're the most fulfilled.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:12

Who out there is going some smart hotel fund or large hospitality group has got to be smart enough to reach out to you and say, we will bankroll your projects, you find the land, you do the design, give us a return, and we'll you know, bankroll your acquisition and development.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:34

Like that's gotta that'd be my miracle right there. That's what I'm praying for, Connor.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:41

Gotta get Amon Group on the phone or something and talk some sense into them.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:48

Someone, someone who who can buy into the vision because the reality is, is we we know how to make, we know how to make money in this space. We know how to build profitable entities. And I think one of the benefits, and I say this for everybody listening, of not having a lot of resources, of not having, you know, someone bankrolling your your project, is you learn to get very creative and profit-minded because otherwise you won't last very long.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:19

You can't afford to make mistakes or spending.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:22

No, you can't afford to throw money at pro problems and just hope for the best. You have to get really good at being very disciplined with generating ROI. And that's what this that's what this takes. And we we know how to do that. And you know, I that's that's the challenge, I think, for this space is to to attract more capital into this space. We all got to get good at demonstrating this is this industry's a good bet because we know how to make returns.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:55

Do you have a full-time PR person, few and far?

Opportunities Ahead And Audience Invite

SPEAKER_03 1:26:59

We do. We have an amazing agency in LA that represents us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:05

Okay. Because I gotta imagine that is like the the the the product and the story and you as the face of the brand is all there, right? It just needs to get out. It just needs to get out there, and I think it will just be devoured. Just and then I just feel like the PR piece is so strong for what you're working on.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:26

Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:27

We've got lots of stories to tell.

SPEAKER_04 1:27:28

That's yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:30

Yeah. Amazing. Is there anything else? Is there anything else that's your on your horizon that we haven't talked about?

SPEAKER_03 1:27:39

We've covered a lot of ground.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:41

We did.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:42

But a lot of ground. I think the future's bright. I think the future's tough. We're we're we're still living in an economic climate that's I mean, we I feel like since COVID rolled around, we haven't had a we haven't had an easy year. Yet, and I don't know that we're gonna get one anytime soon. But I I think I think the opportunities for this industry and this space are enormous, and there's still a lot of work to be done, and not just for building, you know, cool places to stay, but actually doing meaningful work with solving some of our big world problems. And you can pick a problem, don't have to pick we don't all have to pick the same problem, but I I I think our opportunities, you know, are enormous to this industry to make a real difference in our world, whether that's race, uh, diversity, women, climate, and the environment. I mean, we could go on and on and on with with choosing issues, right? But I think our our opportunities are are great if we if we'll choose to stand in the gap.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:57

Yeah, well said. Well said. Any asks of the audience for what you're working on? Any yeah, any asks?

SPEAKER_03 1:29:04

Oh, well, I obviously please come and stay with us. We would love either to create a really extraordinary adventure for you somewhere in the world or to host you at our reserve in Africa. So if you're thinking about going to Africa, most definitely come and stay with us. We we need you. We need you to help us do the work that we're trying to do. So yeah, please, please come and travel with us.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:33

Yeah, well agreed. Give her a follow on social media, or better yet, leave her a Google review on her property or tell your friends about it, or go stay there. Anything you can. I know I will. And Sarah, it's always such a an honor and a privilege to have you on. I feel like every 60 seconds I just kept thinking to myself, like, oh, what's such a badass. Um it's very inspiring to have you back on the show. And I I look forward to keeping in touch and seeing how far you come, you know, six months from now, 12 months from now. I'm definitely bullish on you and what you're working on.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:10

Thank you. Thank you for the encouragement, Connors. Appreciate it.