Building Safaris, Supporting Tanzania: The Maasai Wanderings Story
The Mission
Maasai Wanderings isn’t your typical safari outfit. Founded in Tanzania, Maasai Wanderings is deeply rooted in Tanzanian culture and ideals and with the Tanzanian people. The company offers an alternative to the resource-extraction model commonly seen in the safari industry.
In East Africa, most operations are foreign-owned, importing everything and exporting profits back to Europe. Maasai Wanderings, meanwhile, proudly creates everything from scratch in Tanzania. Everything in their camps is made by Tanzanian artisans, from the tables to the tents to the beds. What's more, they invest in their community. They support anti-poaching efforts, build schools, and send employees' children to college.
As such, Maasai Wanderings' guests get an authentically Tanzanian safari experience. Look elsewhere if you're looking for a colonial-themed trip to East Africa. You'll see the big five, but you'll probably also visit a Maasai village. You'll eat some Tanzanian food and drink some Tanzanian beer. It's precisely the sort of sustainable business model that EFM loves to support.
Over the last 25 years, Maasai Wanderings has grown from owning and operating one Land Rover to owning and operating over 60. They've developed their own network of gorgeous camps across the Serengeti. They employ over 200 people, many of whom have been with the company for decades. Despite all their success, their business model is still dependent on travel agents to book their business.
Most Maasai Wanderings' bookings come from third-party European tour agents. The agents book guests on their own websites. Then, after taking a deposit, they contact a series of operators on the ground in Tanzania to actually provide the service. This inevitably leads to a race to the bottom for pricing, which is not passed onto the travelers. Most of the profits were staying in Antwerp instead of Arusha.
The Challenge
Our goal was to help Maasai Wanderings regain control of their revenue stream. That meant being able to drive their own demand for their safaris. And that, in turn, meant building a digital advertising structure from almost nothing.
Understandably, the client had been more focused on realities on the ground in Tanzania than maintaining a website or building a customer database. In a part of the world where the internet is still young and in an industry operating far from the nearest cell tower, going digital was seen more as a liability than a strength.
The website was outdated, cluttered and full of broken links. Old photos with watermarks told potential visitors 'scam', rather than ‘fun, safe experience.’ Decades of customer data were stored on scraps of paper in a box in Arusha. There was zero visibility into who their clients had been, let alone who their future clients might be. Were they French? American? Men? Women? Families? Nobody knew. To make matters more challenging we had a limited budget, so every dollar had to count.
“EFM gave us the tools and voice to speak directly to our clients. For the first time, our story—the real story of Maasai Wanderings—reaches people in a way that inspires them to travel with us.”
The Solution
We started by tearing down their old website and rebuilding it from the ground up. We didn’t want to replace their existing site, which carried a sense of authenticity, with just another cookie-cutter safari website. Instead, we aimed to highlight what truly sets Maasai Wanderings apart: its deep commitment to Tanzania.
To tell the story and get the content we needed, we put our Emmy-winning director, Dominic Dezzutti onto a plane with a film crew and sent them to Tanzania. They documented everything Maasai Wanderings was doing. They visited the company's workshops and the company's camps deep in the Serengeti. They spent time with the guides, many of whom have extraordinary backgrounds. They also filmed a series of interviews of with Maasai Wanderings' founder and CEO, Donna Duggan, who's vision of safari travel is as personal as it is compelling.
The content they captured brought the Maasai Wanderings story to life. For the first time, prospective guests could see what set the company apart, get a sense of the people and their philosphy. It brought the Maasai Wanderings story to life. We embedded the footage and photos they captured into their new website and loaded it up with conversion points.
Now that the story had been told, our remaining (massive) challenge was to get it in front of the right eyes. You can tell the best story in the world, offer the best product, and if nobody knows about it, you're not going to get very far. And, since we didn't have any past customer data, we were tasked with finding potential clients without any insights at all.
“When you’re competing with global tour operators with massive budgets, every ad dollar has to work twice as hard. The challenge was finding the right people without any historical targeting data to guide us.”
EFM's Director of Advertising and sociologist-turned-targeting specialist, Travis Derrouse, did what he does best: market research. His team analyzed marketing trends and studied competitor behavior. With this information, they devised a strategy to reach high-potential safari clients around the globe. Using this new data, the ads team set up a remarketing funnel and started serving ads to keep Maasai Wanderings at the top of their minds.
Finally, we built a customer database to create order from the data madness. All the information stored in notebooks and filing cabinets in Arusha was digitized. New prospect data was sorted and stored in a searchable, organized CMS. This organization not only helped with ad targeting, it allowed Maasai Wanderings to keep connected to potential clients long after they left the site.
The Results
The transformation was immediate. Within a month of launching the new website, traffic increased by 300%. And, these weren't empty clicks - these were engaged prospects spending a meaningful amount of time on the site. The videos Dominic created attracted thousands of views, with clients referencing them during booking inquiries. Most importantly of all, Maasai Wanderings saw a threefold increase in direct bookings.
With each new booking comes valuable client data, enabling a feedback loop. This feedback look results in a continuing refinement of marketing strategy. And, each new booking results in more revenue going directly to Maasai Wanderings and Tanzania.
For us, this project was about more than traffic and bookings. It was about supporting a company that doesn't just operate IN Tanzania -- it strengthens Tanzania. We're proud to have helped put Maasai Wanderings back in control of its future, where it can build a stable, resilient local economy.