HOW DO I TRAVEL ON SO MANY SAFARIS?
Travel agents get invited on ‘familiarisation trips’. This is where the operator invites the agent to test their product for free or at a greatly reduced price. The agent will pay their own flights and tips. There is an investment from both sides.
Most of the safaris invite me to ride for free. Sometimes I get the ride at cost and once or twice I’ve paid full price. Almost always I bring a group of paying guests to reduce the impact of my free saddle on the operator. I like to bring guests so that I can get their opinion on the ride too. These pioneer rides are often loads of fun with a great sense of adventure.
Other agencies will give guests that have travelled with them many times before a reduced cost ride and use them as their guinea-pigs. I prefer to go myself. The only way to truly understand the nuances of each ride is to go. Each ride has a personality and and my job is to match the personality of the ride to the personality of the guest.
It is an incredible benefit of the job but I can see that if you had a family at home it would be quite destructive over time. In my first full year of business I went on 11 safaris. It’s like eating chocolate cake. It’s great, but when you have it every day it becomes bad for you.
HOW DID I GET STARTED?
Things were very easy for me at the start. Jakob von Plessen from Jakotango did all the heavy lifting. In 2019 he invited me to ride with him in Argentina. He’d found me on instagram through Dreamy Ponies, a repost account that I had grown to about 230,000 followers. I had recently revealed myself as the curator by sharing posts from a riding holiday to Slovenia. Once he saw that I was a real person and rider and not just a content factory marketing cheap t-shirts from China he got in touch.
Jakob’s wonderful, patient, booking agent Paula taught me a lot, sorting all the details of the ride at Jakotango for me. I had no clue how to promote a ride. I didn’t have a website. I didn’t know what commission rates were or how to handle the money. But off I went with my iPhone 13 pro and a duffle bag filled with riding clothes.
At dinner one evening Jakob generously referred to me as an agent and I squirmed in my chair from imposter syndrome. One of the guests clocked that I must be riding for free and made a sly comment implying so. My imposter syndrome worsened dramatically. I was determined to make Jakob’s generosity pay off for him. I would have to figure it all out.
I filmed everything. My phone was linked up to a 10,000 mwh battery the entire ride and I got loads and loads of content. At the afternoon siestas I would retreat to my tent and cut up clips of the best shots from the day and use the base camp wifi to post to stories, asking followers to DM their email addresses for more information. The camp is remote and the wifi wasn’t strong enough to download message responses regularly though I would see them coming through. When I arrived back to cell reception in Bariloche I was shocked to see almost 700 people had responded.
I answered the DMs by emailing everyone a brochure that Paula in the Jakotango office had shared with me. Anyone who confirmed they’d like to ride I forwarded them on to her. It was all pretty primitive but it worked. We had four bookings quite quickly… and then Covid-19 hit.
I went back to focusing on my day job. It was quite a relief that I didn’t get too caught up in the troubles that the travel industry had to deal with. I did learn the lesson from a distance that cash isn’t earned until the holiday is complete and this is a philosophy I’ll carry on always.
WHAT WAS MY INITIAL PLAN?
I was so burnt out from years of working 9am to 9pm in my previous role. I didn’t want to create another prison for myself so I set out to create a portfolio of just the best 12 rides in the world. One for each month in the year. Enough to keep me busy enough and that’s all.
By February 2022 I had quit my finance job to work on the travel agency. I figured out the regulations, incorporated a company, worked out how to collect, pay and hold cash, wrote terms and conditions and made a website. Next I needed to list the safaris.
I’m an A-type analytical person so I had to go deep before I could get back up to the 12 rides. I spent a month putting together a directory of 1,600 rides around the world. I listed which agencies they all worked with, I looked at the group sizes, how they were marketed, what the price per night was for all of them so I can standardise the value of each.
The directory is still a work in progress as things are ever changing but I started to identify a list of the rides that I saw as the world’s best and really wanted to represent. There were obvious front runners - Offbeat in Kenya, Namibia Horse Safaris, riding in the Okavango Delta. Already representing Jakob opened many doors for me. My dream partners were open to have me represent them and so many generously invited me to ride with them.
HOW TO DIFFERENTIATE ?
There are already quite a number of riding holiday agents and they all have excellent reputations. What a dream to work in an industry with no bad players. I didn’t want to tread on anyones toes. I don’t want to capture the market or grow and grow endlessly year on year. The truth is not everyone is my ideal client and I knew this right from the start.
The average person on a riding holiday is a women in her fifties. They have the time as the kids are all out of the house, and they have the means as they’re in the comfortable phase of life. They’re exactly who I hope to be when I reach their age. Even so, it can be lonely even when surrounded by incredible people when they are not quite your people.
So Black Saddle I knew would be for younger people that were social media savvy, that were adventurous, with strong ambitions and big ideas that simply hadn’t thought about going on a riding holiday or just had no one to go with. I wanted the agency to be a social club for like-minded people.
Having posted on Dreamy Ponies for eight years and grown the account to over 900,000 followers I knew the power of photography and video. I also knew what equestrian content will go viral. I focused on aesthetics and worked with incredible photographers like country life photographer Georgina Preston, high end fashion photographer Yan Yugay and animal photographer Lina to show the rides in a beautiful way fit for a magazine publication. Show don’t tell.
It worked and my clients are almost always exactly in my ideal demographic with a few wonderful and welcome exceptions.
WHERE TO NEXT
Black Saddle is long past 12 rides - there are more wonderful experiences than that to share. What I would like for the agency though is for it to become the gold standard for riding holidays. That people can trust that every ride on the website will be an incredible mind-blowing, life affirming experience where you can leave your decision making for that week to the guides and just live in the moment with like-minded people.
Emma
Browse all rides here.