MICEBOOK - LUXE REPORT 5 - Flipbook - Page 19
“It’s less about seeing and doing and more about
feelings and emotions. We take groups to see iconic
aractions, but we try to weave in other elements that
take them deeper, sometimes so subtly that they don't
even realise that they're going deeper,” says group CEO
Richard Holt.
“Personalisation is the word I use. Like authentic, it’s
another word that is overused in our industry. But what is
personalisation? How do you do that? It’s about bringing
emotions and reality into it and enabling people who are
from different backgrounds to talk to each other. I call it
liing the lid on the surface tourism and going underneath
the surface, because when you do that, you find lots of
interesting people.”
Concepts Collection has spent the past few years building
up a list of ‘Cape Town Icons’ who are local people that
have interesting stories to tell, for example the first female
black winemaker in South Africa or the first black wine
farm owner in South Africa.
“The winelands are very affluent, very historic and very
beautiful, but it is traditionally a very white dominated
industry that excluded any black people unless they were
farm labourers. They used to get minimal salaries, and half
the salaries were paid in wine, which oen led to
alcoholism,” he says.
“We’re now seeing the emergence of a whole range of new
black and coloured winemakers who are transforming the
industry and creating role models for the future. So, we
take groups to visit their wineries and invite them to join us
for lunch and talk about their lives. To hear them tell
stories about how they were brought up, how their
grandparents died of alcoholism, and how they didn’t have
shoes to wear to school, but now they have transformed
their lives and are making some of the best wines South
Africa has to offer is really powerful.”
19
