THE LAST thing anyone wants is for African safaris to go the way of so many popular holiday choices, with everyone visiting the same attractions, staying in the same places and having the same experiences. Fortunately, Jose Cortes is determined to make sure that doesn't happen.
Based in Cape Town, his job largely involves dealing with partners - more than 300 of them, most of them safari camps and other providers of accommodation. Not that he gets out into the wilderness quite as often as he'd like. 'When I moved here, I got really excited,' he says. 'I thought I'd be in the bush once a month. But sadly I have to run the business.'
For most of the company's existence, though, Cortes was an investment banker - not the sort of job that usually leaves people with the time and energy for moonlighting, let alone running a labour-intensive, rapidly expanding business. He worked in Manila, New York City and Hong Kong, eventually for Lehman Brothers - and when that bank went the way of all inept speculators in 2008, he decided to focus on the safari business.
Asia to Africa started in the mid-1990s with just two people, when Cortes was working at JP Morgan in Hong Kong. 'The guy sitting next to me on the trading floor had just come back from a trip to Africa, and I could tell he was really blown away by it. So I just copied what he did,' he says. 'But I thought: how do I book this? At that time, the internet was very young, and I booked by e-mail through a Johannesburg travel agency. I had a sense that they were legit, but they could just have not turned up at the airport, and I'd have lost US$10,000.
'I went on that trip, and it was the best thing I'd ever done. Then I thought I'd do it as a business - to fill a market gap, but also to do something I enjoy.'