Independent assessment
We assess the guest experience at Africa's finest establishments. As a guest. Anonymously.
An anonymous assessor experiences your property end to end, and you receive the measured account.
No announcement, no host, no allowance made. The booking is made the way any guest would make it, the bill is paid the way any guest would pay it, and what follows is a written account of what actually happened — to you, and to nobody else.
A guest notices everything, and mentions almost none of it.
What nobody tells you
Guests rarely complain. They simply stop coming back.
A change room that was not quite turned around. Eleven minutes in a chair with nothing to look at, when four would have been unremarkable. A product recommended at the precise moment a guest had stopped thinking. None of it is a disaster. None of it is ever raised.
Nobody tells the owner. They tell their friends.
It leaves as a five-star review and a booking that is not repeated. By the time the pattern is visible in the numbers, it has been running for a year, and the people best placed to see it are the people who stopped being able to see it the week they started.
We are the guest who tells you everything.
A trained assessor books, arrives, is treated and pays like any other guest — then you read what a guest never says aloud.
The same visit can be made to your property.
What is measured
Five moments of a visit. One account of all five.
A visit is not one experience. It is five, and a guest carries the weakest of them home.
Excellence in four of them and carelessness in the fifth does not average out. It is remembered as the fifth. That is why nothing is assessed in isolation here — the account you receive follows one guest through the whole of a visit, in the order they met it, and shows you where the line held and where it did not.
Which five moments, and what is looked for inside each, is not published and will not be. An establishment that knows the shape of the visit is no longer being visited as a guest, and the moment that shape is public it is worth nothing to you.
The evidence
Four numbers sit behind one account.
- 185 questions
- 185questionsasked of a single visit
- 72 hours
- 72hoursbefore a guest is asked what remains
- 5 moments
- 5momentsof a visit, observed in sequence
- 30 jurisdictions
- 30jurisdictionsresearched before a word was written
How any of it works is not published, and will not be. That is the part you are paying for.
What we offer
Anonymous assessment of the whole guest experience.
From first enquiry to final goodbye — booked, experienced and paid for like any ordinary visit, measured like nothing else you receive.
Five ways to buy it. One covers the visit entire; the other four each cover a single part of it, for establishments that would rather begin somewhere than everywhere.
The whole of it
The Whole Guest Journey
One visit, assessed end to end, from the first enquiry to what a guest still remembers days later.
Read more
Before They Arrive
The enquiry, the booking and the confirmation, assessed exactly as a guest meets them.
The First Impression
Arrival, the welcome, and the ten minutes in which a guest decides what kind of place this is.
What They Came For
The treatment, the table, the room — the thing itself, reported without flattery.
How They Leave You
The settle, the goodbye, and what is still there seventy-two hours later.
Who we assess
Nineteen kinds of establishment, each assessed as a guest of that kind.
A guest journey through a safari lodge is nothing like a guest journey through a day spa. Find yours, and read what an assessment of it would actually tell you.
- Hotels
- Boutique hotels
- Lodges
- Safari and game lodges
- Private villas and residences
- Day spas
- Hotel and resort spas
- Wellness retreats
- Restaurants
- Wine estates
- Cruises
- Luxury trains
- Yachts and charters
- Private aviation
- Airport lounges
- Chauffeur and transfer services
- Golf estates
- Private members’ clubs
- Travel designers and concierges
What happens next
An introduction is a conversation, and then a proposal.
- One
You send three lines
Your name, your property, and where to reach you. That is the whole of it.
- Two
Our team replies within three working days
A conversation, at a time that suits you, about what you want to know and whether we are the right people to find it out.
- Three
A written proposal follows
What would be assessed, when, and what it costs. Nothing is agreed until you agree to it.
No obligation at any point, and no sales call. If it is not right, our team will say so — that is cheaper for both of us than the alternative.
Request an introduction
Three lines, and our team will be in touch.
We reply to every enquiry within three working days. There is nothing to sign and nothing to pay for at this stage.