African Hotels and Adventure (AHA), the tourism property management business of Tourvest’s Accommodation and Activities (TAA) division, has announced that it intends to grow its portfolio of properties beyond the Southern African region, to take advantage of the growing number of leisure and business travellers into other African countries.

TAA Chief Executive, Gary Elmes, said the success of its Victoria Falls and Botswana lodges had prompted Tourvest to look outside Southern Africa for further growth opportunities. 

“Our initial approach will be to look for properties in countries in which Tourvest already has a presence, either through its retail travel operations or its inbound tour operator division, or which complement Tourvest’s activity-based businesses such as Drifters, which offers overland safari tours as far afield as Uganda and East Africa.”

Elmes said the company had started looking at properties in Kenya, Ghana, the Ivory Coast and Uganda and had entered into preliminary negotiations with a number of property owners.  He said Tourvest’s focus was not limited to lodges, and it was also looking at owning or managing hotels in major African cities.

“To manage the growth, we are looking for a Managing Director, who will be responsible for the current portfolio as well as its future expansion.”

Elmes said AHA offered hotel owners a number of benefits, including integrated support functions, access to the e-Res reservation tool that plugged into as many as 22 online channels, including leading global travel distribution systems such as Galileo, Amadeus and Expedia.com, as well as the properties’ own online web booking engine.