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Why this hotel raced to stage a three-day Serengeti run

It’s a “fine line,” says Singita’s Lindy Rousseau, between creating an experience for guests and creating one that is “genuinely is part of a bigger picture with a much longer-term outcome.”

Part of Singita's five-day Serengeti experience included a fun run with local schoolgirls.
Part of Singita’s five-day Serengeti experience included a fun run with local schoolgirls.

For hotel companies, that increasingly means tapping into a guest’s impulse to participate meaningfully with the destination – along with getting a once-in-a-lifetime, eminently Instagrammable experience along the way.

Singita, which manages lodges and safaris in Tanzania, South Africa, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, brought those goals together in October with a five-day experience for a small group of women runners. The event required an upfront donation of US$15,000 and was hosted by the hotel company’s conservation nonprofit arm and Brave, a regional running nonprofit that supports girls.

The experience? A three-day, 90-km run across the Serengeti – at a pace and distance chosen by the women, who were accompanied by armed anti-poaching guards scouting for buffalo, lions and elephants. Animals were spotted along the route, but none required the runners to break their stride, said Rousseau, Singita’s sales and marketing director.

A group of ten runners was accompanied by armed guards during their 90-km October journey.
A group of ten runners was accompanied by armed guards during their 90-km October journey.

The women also participated in a fun run with local schoolgirls, a career fair and a day-long immersion in the hotel’s conservation efforts. Funds benefited local female empowerment programs.

Bigger picture

“The reason we could stage this event so successfully and get that balance right is because it sits in the context of a much bigger picture,” Rousseau said, citing Singita’s 100-year purpose to protect African land. “That purpose requires revenue in order to make it a reality” – revenue from the hospitality component and other sources that fund conservation work that includes biodiversity and community management. The programs managed by the hotel nonprofit are not viewed as a corporate social responsibility task, Rousseau said. “They are part of our business model.”  

“The work they’re doing with women and girls are ongoing programs that ultimately, if we are not successful in our business model, can’t survive. So they’re not voyeuristic, ‘come and see how girls live in the Serengeti and make a donation’ programs – they are programs that are real and delivering outcomes that will make us sustainable,” she said.

A running program made sense. “Circumstances that young girls are raised in these rural areas is very concerning,” Rousseau said. Many girls leave school early and marry young. “And 10 years ago when we started to work there, there were no women in the workplace because it was just culturally not acceptable… The goal is to show young girls, who might not realize that they have other options, that an exercise like running can create all sorts of opportunities for them.”

“It’s also a very empowering thing,” she said. “It’s something (the girls) would have chosen to do for themselves. It’s not something that they were told because culturally it’s acceptable to do or not do.”

The aim was to have 12 runners for the event, which went to market in April 2018 and was held in October. Ten joined, including a couple of sponsored runners to help promote future events, so not everyone paid full freight (one staff member crowdfunded her way into the event). “We knew that the first event would primarily be a marketing opportunity,” Rousseau said, including capturing images to market future events. For the next event in October, the goal is 18 paying runners, who can choose how far they want to run per day.

“It’s not a race, it’s a journey,” Rousseau said. “That’s something we learned we need to communicate more as well, because the 90 km was something that maybe made people feel that they wouldn’t be able to do it.”

The compressed timeframe to plan such a complex event – six months – created “a ridiculous amount of pressure” on her and her staff, Rousseau said, laughing. That includes ensuring medical assistance, hiring guards and vehicles and creating an online payment portal.

What they learned

What is she doing differently next time? Besides distance options and timing, “we need a headline sponsor,” Rousseau said. “It’s actually pretty expensive to stage an event like this, and we want as much of the money as possible to go to the girls.”

As well, the hotel based projections on double occupancy, but some runners wanted privacy, “so we’ve had to rethink how we structure the donation portion and the accommodation portion to accommodate single runners.” Singita also will employ a larger camp rather than last year’s mobile tented camp, a bigger financial outlay. It’s also considering opportunities for partners to join at the beginning or end of the run.

With staff time and other expenses, including 20% to hard costs of outfitting the runners and paying for flights of the sponsored runners, probably tops the total that went to the nonprofit (Rousseau declined to give dollar figures).

There were some unexpected outcomes, she says: “The respect that the anti-poaching scouts” – all rugged, culturally Tanzanian men – “started to feel for women, the photographers who photographed the whole event, the videographers who were mostly men who just developed such incredible bonds with these women and the young girls through these interactions.”

There also were bonds among the runners themselves, reflected in imagery that was very moving to see.

“You realize the power of bringing a group of people together with a common purpose that is so meaningful, how that unites people. People from all different walks of life, and all different.”

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