Speaking on the panel ‘Impactful Luxury Hoteliers: Redefining Luxury with Purpose’, Simon Stobbs, chief B2B sales officer and South Africa managing director for Wilderness, said that the company’s success since 1983 was based on its core, unwavering principles.

He said: “Our success didn’t happen overnight. When we started over forty years ago, we didn’t have any camps. We had two people in Land Rovers in Botswana and they brought in everything from South Africa. Eventually, they thought that there had to be a better way, and that there had to be a better impact on the ground and in helping the local people and the areas in which we operate.”

He added: “It was then that we started setting up the camps. Once we had the first one in place, we had an area to protect in terms of biodiversity. We could then employ locals and educate their children. That’s been our fundamental model ever since. We built one camp, then another—now, we have 60 camps and they’re all based on the same principle.”

Sustainability, he said, had had to be implemented from the top of the business. Even today, Stobbs said Wilderness’s business decisions were based with sustainable impact at its heart. The other things needed, he said, were intent and a plan, the commitment of resources, and being able to measure what they did and the impact it has.

He went on: “We have 30 people, or around 1% of our workforce, whose sole role is sustainability and impact. There’s a lot of greenwashing in the industry and we have to be accountable for what we say we do. We can measure things like biodiversity and emissions, but there’s room to do much more. Ultimately, it boils down to wanting to do the right thing.”