Zannon James

Africa is my professional specialism, but I travel extensively beyond the continent too. I have lived in Bangkok, Dubai, Arusha and Lusaka, and have travelled through Europe and Asia.

Most recently, in August 2026, I spent 30 days travelling through Europe, including Zurich, Paris, Barcelona, Antwerp, Menton and Amsterdam. That trip was personal, and I think that matters. I still travel because I love travelling, not because every journey needs to be a work trip or a site inspection.

Travelling internationally keeps my understanding of hospitality current. I am constantly experiencing how different destinations approach hotels, restaurants, transport, design, service and the overall guest experience. It gives me a global benchmark. Africa remains the place I understand most deeply.

I generally believe four nights should be the minimum amount of time spent on safari. Two-night stays sometimes make operational sense, but they are rarely my preference.

By the time you arrive, settle in, meet your guide, understand the rhythm of the lodge and begin connecting with the environment, you are already preparing to leave.

I believe strongly in slower travel. I would rather remove one destination and make the remaining journey exceptional than add another place simply because we can.

For me, guiding is one of the most important elements of safari. A brilliant guide changes how you understand an ecosystem. They connect animal behaviour, landscape, conservation, culture and people. They know when to move. They also know when to stay still.

Some of my strongest safari memories are simple ones: watching rhinos playing in the mud at Kapama, and seeing a leopard drinking beside my private plunge pool. Neither experience needed anything added to it.

Luxury might mean a private helicopter, a private villa or the perfect bottle of wine waiting after a game drive. But it can also mean having enough time, or being somewhere with almost nobody else around.

A guide remembering which animal your child desperately wants to see. A lodge team learning how you drink your coffee before you need to ask. Real luxury comes from connecting the traveller’s expectations with the experience.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in African travel is building an itinerary around famous lodge brands simply because they are famous. A collection of exceptional properties does not automatically create an exceptional journey.

The lodges need to make sense together. The wildlife experiences need to complement each other. The routing and pace need to work. Most importantly, the trip needs to make sense for the person travelling.

Some less famous reserves and lodges offer extraordinary wildlife, guiding, hospitality and space without the crowds or price attached to the best-known names. Sometimes those are exactly where I want my clients to go.

Honeymoons are one of my favourite journeys to design because they allow us to create something deeply personal around two people at an important point in their lives.

Africa gives us enormous freedom: Cape Town and the Winelands, a private safari villa, a remote tented camp, an Indian Ocean island, or a journey built almost entirely around wilderness.

There is no honeymoon template at Mason & Wild. I want to understand the people first. Then we design the journey.

Tourism should uplift African communities and help protect Africa’s wild spaces. For me, conservation-forward travel means being conscious of the impact of the money being spent.

That does not mean turning someone’s holiday into a conservation lecture. People should enjoy themselves. But Africa’s wildlife cannot be separated from the communities living alongside it. Where possible, I want tourism spending to strengthen both.

I do not support wildlife petting, walking with captive lions or attractions where wild animals are kept primarily for tourist interaction. Legitimate rehabilitation and conservation work is different. But wildlife should not exist as a prop for photographs.

One of the reasons safari is so powerful is that nature remains in control. Sometimes you search for a leopard for hours and see nothing. Then the following morning one appears beside your room. That unpredictability is part of the experience.

Africa is still frequently reduced internationally to a narrow story of poverty, danger and wilderness. That is not the Africa I know.

Africa is also home to world-class hospitality, sophisticated cities, extraordinary entrepreneurs, restaurants, design, technology, art, conservation and some of the finest luxury travel experiences in the world. Having travelled extensively internationally, I am comfortable making that comparison.

You can come to Africa and have one of the most luxurious holidays of your life. You can also have one of the most human. Those things are not contradictory.

I believe African travel needs more African voices. For me, African-led expertise means understanding the destinations, the people, the land and the cultures from within the continent rather than treating Africa purely as a product being sold somewhere else.

There is enormous knowledge within our tourism industry. My own career exists because of it. One of the things I want younger Africans to understand is that our beautiful continent can also give them a beautiful career.

Mason & Wild is the expression of everything I have learned during my career. I wanted to create an African travel company that listens before it sells. A company where LGBTQ+ representation is real rather than performative. A company that understands luxury without reducing luxury to price. And a company that remains proudly African.

Our identity can be summed up in three words: Authentic. Luxury. African.

We listen before we design. We communicate. We pay attention. We build journeys around people rather than pushing people into existing packages. I work with luxury travellers, families, groups and LGBTQ+ travellers, with a particular love for designing honeymoons.

I want clients to feel heard, to trust that I know what I am doing and to feel supported while they travel. When they arrive in Africa, I want there to be something unexpectedly familiar about it. A sense of home.