Eleven, since 2011
Six plan, five are on the road
In 2011 two of us drove the Draa in a borrowed car to check whether a route a client had booked was as described. It was not. We wrote it up, redrew it, and ran it again the following month with four people. That is still roughly the method.
Fifteen years later the list is sixty-two routes long and every one of them has been driven, walked or ridden end to end by someone in this office — most of them more than once, and all of them since the last time anything changed on the ground.
What that costs us is growth. What it buys you is a straight answer on the phone about whether a route is right for the month you are asking about — and, twice this year, the answer that it is not.
What that costs us is growth. What it buys you is a straight answer on the phone about whether a route is right for the month you are asking about — and, twice this year, the answer that it is not.
Nadia & Youssef
The two in the borrowed car, 2011
01 · Fifteen years
02 · How we work
Four rules
01
We go first
No route is sold before someone here has done it end to end, and none stays on the list longer than two years without being done again.
02
Eight is the ceiling
We have never run a group of nine. Past eight the guide stops being a guide and starts being a shepherd, and everyone can feel it.
03
The money stays
Houses, guides and drivers are paid direct and in full before you arrive. No commission is taken out of the room rate, ever.
04
We say no
About a third of what people ask us for, we turn down — usually because the timing is wrong, occasionally because the request is not ours to sell.
04 · The other third
What we turn down
5 · Our mission
