AFRICAMPS: Bringing the Safari Tent Home to South Africa’s Working Land
Leading South African glamping business, AfriCamps, is putting tourists in touch with the heart and soul of the country by bringing them to untouched, unspoilt land that works as part of a wider ecosystem. This model has allowed the business, and glamping space, to grow significantly. Director Jeroen van Rootselaar tells Enterprise Africa more about building a business based on partnership and authenticity.
Supported by:
South Africa has always been a country of extraordinary natural beauty — from the fynbos-covered hillsides of the Western Cape to the ancient escarpments of the Drakensberg, from the sun-baked ostrich farms of the Karoo to the wave-lashed Wild Coast. For decades, experiencing that beauty meant booking a game reserve or a five-star lodge. Then came AfriCamps.
Founded in 2014 by Dutch entrepreneurs Jeroen van Rootselaar and Manou Bleumink, AfriCamps identified something nobody else in South Africa’s tourism industry had quite seen: the potential to place high-quality glamping tents across working farms and privately owned land, putting visitors inside the country’s living, breathing agricultural soul. More than a decade on, the business has grown into a network of 209 safari-style glamping tents nationwide, with 60 direct employees at headquarters and more than 100 people employed across its partner camps. Today, because of its positioning, delivery and quality, revenue is strong and continues to grow.
Van Rootselaar arrived in South Africa in 2006 and spent a decade running a youth travel company , working with Bleumink, serving European university interns — work that gave him an intimate understanding of how international visitors relate to the country. Travelling back to Europe, he noticed something that sparked a very different idea.
“I picked up on the glamping trend in Europe in 2014,” he tells Enterprise Africa. “From a South Africa perspective, there were safari style tents standing on working farms in England, Italy, and the Netherlands, but they were only on game reserves here. I saw the opportunity with so much beauty in South Africa, a lot of farmers looking for alternative revenue streams, and we decided to bring the safari tent back to South Africa. On protea flower farms, wine farms, ostrich farms etc, it has been a hit.”
MADE IN SOUTH AFRICA
From the outset, the product needed to be genuinely different from anything South Africa already offered. The distinction van Rootselaar draws between a glamping tent and the traditional safari tent reveals how carefully the concept was thought through. “They are not the same thing,” he says. “The glamping tent is a family product and is for parents and kids with a self-catering experience – more like a canvas apartment. A safari tent is more like a canvas hotel room made out of canvas, sometimes with a bathroom, but definitely not a kitchen of any kind. It is better for couples, and not the best for families.”
That gap in the market was clear. Finding the right product to fill it proved harder. “It was a challenge in South Africa to find a glamping style safari tent like those seen in Europe, America and Australia for the budget we had, so we developed our own.”
Today, AfriCamps manufactures all of its own tents and much of the furniture inside them, sourcing locally wherever possible. The company nurtured partnerships with local suppliers producing a coated fabric that is highly UV resistant, can be painted, and carries environmental credentials that mass-market alternatives cannot match. Standard polyester tents require replacing every four years; AfriCamps tents offer two to three times the lifespan, reducing the waste that has become a concern for an industry increasingly judged on sustainability.
That environmental thinking is well timed. South Africa’s glamping sector has emerged as a serious force in the tourism economy. Research projects the market will reach revenues of US$95.1 million by 2033, growing at a compound annual rate of 3.8%. The African Travel and Tourism Association has described glamping as reshaping travel across the country, connecting guests with South Africa’s natural beauty while supporting rural communities and small business development. In 2025, South Africa hosted its first dedicated Glamping Expo in Johannesburg, drawing operators, investors and government representatives and underlining just how seriously the sector is now taken. AfriCamps has been ahead of that curve from the start.
LAND WITH CHARACTER
The business model that underpins AfriCamps is a philosophy as much as a commercial strategy. The company does not own the land its camps sit on. Instead, it identifies private landowners — farmers, families, individuals whose property has scenic or experiential potential that is going unrealised — and helps them build a glamping operation from the ground up. AfriCamps brings the tents, the expertise, the marketing, and the network of online and traditional travel agents. The landowner brings the land, the authenticity, and in many cases the produce.
“We partner with landowners and that could be farmers or those not in the tourism industry at all,” van Rootselaar explains. “They might have a piece of land that has no value agriculturally but has value that can be created from tourism. We assist them to develop that piece of land into glamping venture. We love to show our visitors farm produce and authentic South African living, and we feel we can do that better than established resorts, especially when we partner with people who are producing something on the land.”
The selection process for partner sites is rigorous, and location is everything. “A partner for us must have a piece of land that is attractive for tourism. We need to believe people will want to go there in large enough numbers that it will be worth the substantial investment required to create a glamping camp. It is not only about management style, it is all to do with location, location, location. You can be a fantastic manager with amazing marketing, but if your location is not correct then you are already on the backfoot.”
AfriCamps actively favours working with families who have lived on their land across generations, rather than corporate landholders who appoint managers from a distance.
“We feel the soul of that piece of land is not connected” in corporate situations, van Rootselaar says. “When you work on a piece of land that has seen multiple generations of the same family, the owners are embedded and the land has more character.”
BOUNCING BACK
Like every business in South Africa’s tourism sector, AfriCamps was tested by Covid-19. International arrivals collapsed, inbound expenditure fell sharply, and hundreds of thousands of jobs disappeared. “The Covid experience was a major challenge,” van Rootselaar acknowledges, “but we survived that very well considering we are a nature-oriented tourism product. When the world opened up, people wanted to go out into nature and with their families, and we had a very successful restart.”
The recovery was swift, and expansion has continued steadily since. New camps have been developed across the country and AfriCamps is now pushing into the Eastern Cape and the Drakensberg, with early contacts being made in the Wild Coast — one of South Africa’s most spectacular and least commercialised coastal regions. A new premium product is also taking shape. “Last year, we launched a more premium style tent,” van Rootselaar says. “We have always been known as a family product, and we felt that the glamping market has moved into the couple-upmarket space. We developed a two-person tent that has much higher finishes and we are now rolling that out over all of our existing camps.”
THE PARTNERSHIP MINDSET
Running through more than a decade of AfriCamps is one consistent idea — the one van Rootselaar places above all else. “We have achieved huge success with the mindset that you don’t need to own everything,” he says. “We are a partnership-based business and we invest heavily in land that is owned by different people, and that brings risk. But it also creates huge opportunity. That mindset opens a lot of doors in this world that gets more challenging each day. Daring to invest in partnerships, and moving away from the thought of owning everything has been the key to our success.”
Those partnerships have taken AfriCamps to places it could never have reached by accumulating assets in the traditional sense. “We have developed camps on the most pristine pieces of land that we could never have owned, but the partnership mindset has allowed us access and we have delivered benefits for AfriCamps and for the partners we work with.”
Landowners who once saw under-utilised acres as a liability now generate consistent tourism revenue, and their guests leave with an experience of South Africa no city hotel or game reserve itinerary could replicate — the smell of a protea farm at dawn, the rhythms of an ostrich farm, the quiet of land worked by the same family for generations.
With a glamping boom gathering pace and a model built on mutual benefit, AfriCamps is a business whose best chapters may still be ahead.