Lubu Tours: Company Impact Through Travel And Tourism

Lubu Tours And Safaris:

Community Impact Through Travel And Tourism

Tloco Natefo Kelebemang Our globalized modern world has resulted in an increase in international travel and more people moving around the world. While this is to be celebrated, it also poses a significant risk to our environment and causes cultural displacements. These challenges can be met by dedicated individuals who understand and practice the perfect balance of profitability and sustainability. Sustainable travel is important as it strikes a balance between responsible tourism and environmental protection. This kind of travel aims to have the least possible negative impact on the environment, culture, and economic development of the destination. In Botswana one organization at the forefront of this movement is Lubu Tours and Safaris. This one hundred percent Motswana-owned business led by Tloco Kelebemang is wholly centered around sustainable travel and here is their inspiring journey.

Tloco Natefo Kelebemang is a travel entrepreneur who believes in sustainable tourism, conservation, and women's empowerment. She has a background in finance and investments and is currently pursuing her Master of Business Administration (MBA) at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business where she has been part of the organizing committee of the 22nd Women in Business Conference. In the past, she held positions such as Equity Research Analyst in Botswana. She is a YALI Regional Leadership Centre of Southern Africa alumna, a MINDS scholar, a Mandela Washington Fellow 2021, and has received extensive leadership development training. As part of her MBA program, she studied Sustainable Finance, Investing, and Impact through an exchange program at the ESMT Berlin, Germany. She has extensive experience in sustainable tourism, research, business, finance, and investments and has worked on brands such as Stanbic Bank of Botswana and Stockbrokers Botswana. Tloco also contributes to and has been featured in several regional publications such as Voyages Afriq, Daily Maverick, and Biz Community.

TRC: Kindly provide a brief overview of Lubu Tours and Safaris. TNK: Lubu Tours and Safaris is an inbound travel company that was established in 2015. The story of

how it came to being is one very close to my heart and I’m always delighted to tell it as it continues to inspire me to contribute meaningfully to communities as well as the local economy. The business was inspired by an experience with the Chobe Safaris Lodge where I participated as a volunteer, through the Chobe Youth Council. The voluntary services that lasted a period of three months happened during the short break between senior school and University. Through this experience, I was exposed to and fell in love with tourism. This is where I witnessed the economic benefits of tourism to communities, the environment, wildlife, and to the country by extension. This spark of inspiration only truly started to manifest in 2015 when I officially registered the business and fully began operations.

Great strides have been made over the years leading up to the pause in economic activity set into being by the Global pandemic of 2020. That period incited my decision to make a strategic shift in the business, and this decision was also inspired by the subsequent travel trends. We are now moving away from just planning trips and curating itineraries and more towards sustainability-focused travel experiences. As a business, we’ve become more focused on the eco-conscious traveler and play a great role in conservation education – not just for our clients but also for the communities where we do business. Furthermore, we are now increasing our destination base to cover the wide region of Africa as a whole. We are slowly repositioning our brand to Lubu Africa Travel pending some documentation steps. Once this is fully in motion, we want to facilitate continent-wide travel. In this move, we are still in the infancy stage of the process where eyeing a couple of countries and establishing partners in those regions to enable a smooth roll-out of the repositioning. Our ethos is two words, and those words are Sustainability and Impact within the context of travel and tourism. Everything we do is underpinned by these words, and this could be anything from conservation education, community engagement, and travel curation. This ethos extends to the way in which we hand-pick our partners consciously bearing in mind what role they play in sustainable travel. We truly embrace our role as a middleman and the responsibility that comes with that. We connect our travelers with partners that resonate with them. Having taken the stand to be sustainability-focused means that we have become very strict about the partners we have, we look for alignment in values between ourselves and the partners in question. For instance, when looking for an accommodation partner we go through a very meticulous vetting system to understand the level of sustainability of the partners. This propels us as a business towards having a greener business.

TRC: How is Lubu Tours and Safaris Playing An Active Role In Community Impact Through Travel And Tourism? TNK: Community initiatives are often used as change catalysts in which members of the community and organizations collaborate to improve the quality of life. Through community

engagements and initiatives, we can necessitate sustainable progress throughout different communities. In 2020 we worked in collaboration with our partner Okavango Hidden Gems in Camp Maru to support a group of women in the Ditshiping community. This community is heavily reliant on tourism and during that era of movement restrictions this community was badly impacted. Many households could not make an income to support their families, so we were honoured to support that community, especially in those trying times. We worked alongside these women to identify key areas that needed relief and we offered our support in essentials such as toiletries, and groceries as well as addressing some key issues that came up.

Another initiative that has been close to our hearts from the early days of our business is Girls Trip Tours partnership. Girls Trip Tours brings women from all over the world to experience Africa the African way through curated cultural excursions. We were on schedule to deliver an experience called the Annual Transformative Travel Experience that focused on women empowerment. The chosen destination for this event was Victoria Falls. However, due to the pandemic, a lot of participants signed out, but we persevered and found new ways to still drive the impact of sustainability education. We hosted the virtual program of Destination Botswana which was centered around Botswana’s tourism industry where I was delighted to give a virtual tour of the Okavango as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The program participants of this program were young people from all over the world. Post that event we are now in a place to connect young people with mentors and opportunities for scholarships all in the sustainable travel and tourism space.

TRC: What are some of the plans you have as a business to ensure impact into the future? TNK: We are in talks with several individuals and institutions to seek ways to do business better to serve both businesses and communities. Having had the privilege to take part in the Mandela Washington Fellowship, my main aim while there was to forge meaningful relationships that can be beneficial to our journey as a business. This was the perfect opportunity for us as a business network and find ways to connect with other Africans and find synergies in creating an impact within the regional context. This would mean that we tell Botswana’s story, use conservation education to ensure that we are building businesses that can continue to contribute to the national economy and the environment. Furthermore, it means we showcase Botswana’s efforts in terms of conservation. And while I was traveling there were a lot of questions with regards to our conservation efforts as a country. We want to tell the stories of why, Botswana has the largest concentration of African elephant. We want to educate the traveler because the power is in the hands of the traveler to be able to choose sustainable travel prac-

tices, and to be able to choose sustainable and conservation-based destinations. Our aim going forward is conservation education. We're in talks with several institutions in the US, Zimbabwe, and other African territories we would like to tap into to establish a map forward.

Another key focus area for us in the future is diaspora travel as it is a growing interest that we can immediately plug into. Research shows that diaspora travel represents $63 billion opportunity for destinations. And I asked myself, where are we as Botswana? Where are we positioned in this movement or in this exciting new thing that's happening that is called diaspora travel? And for me, my first thought was we must be part of this and so we are in talks with institutions also in the US now because we're seeing a lot of black Americans visiting Africa. It's something that we are working on to see how we can also be part of the conversation, how we can position ourselves and how Botswana as a country can also position itself to make the destination attractive to these kinds of travel experiences. What is interesting about people who are interested in diaspora travel is that they are traveling with intent to connect with their roots so it’s almost a low hanging fruit for us as African-owned businesses to step up to this challenge and provide this service to the best of our ability.

TRC: How are you embracing the new type of traveler that’s emerging in our recent years? TNK: While most businesses saw the pandemic as this dark age, we saw it as an opportunity. We are grateful for the pandemic because also it gave us a chance to really pause and think about how we want to do things differently. And we're also excited about the new kind of traveler, because the new kind of traveler is one that is the conscious traveler, you know, the one that travels with purpose and intent, the one that travels for reasons beyond just sight-seeing, or visiting the famous sites and areas, but to give back to the community to engage with women, to engage with their goals, and to conserve natural resources. That's why we're also taking this as an opportunity to do conservation education and our role in sustainable travel really points to our choice of partners. To say we're sustainable, we can only do that through our partners, the partners that provides the final service for the final product in the way that we choose them in the way that we want alignment in terms of information and their visions as well. So, for now I'd say that's how we are playing an active role in engaging today’s global traveler.