In the UK travel trade, relationships are everything. A tour operator's consultant recommends your safari lodge because they have met the team, stayed at the property, and trust that their clients will be looked after. That trust is not built through brochures or email newsletters. It is built through consistent, personal, face-to-face contact over months and years.
Kusa Connect conducts regular meetings and training sessions with tour operators, travel agents and luxury travel consultants across the UK on behalf of our partner properties. Our founder Graeme Watson has spent over 15 years building relationships with the product managers, Africa specialists and senior buyers who decide which properties fill their programmes and receive their clients.
What trade meetings actually achieve
A well-executed trade meeting does several things simultaneously. It keeps your property front of mind with the operators who matter. It gives consultants the specific, vivid knowledge of your property — the details about the new deck, the remarkable guide, the early morning game walk — that they need to recommend you confidently to a client sitting across from them. And it establishes you as a professional, responsive, trustworthy partner that operators want to work with long-term.
"The properties that get consistently recommended are not always the most luxurious. They are the ones whose representatives are in front of the right people, regularly, with something interesting to say."
Our approach to UK trade meetings
We do not conduct blanket call rounds. We maintain a structured programme of meetings with the operators and individual consultants who are actively selling Africa and growing their programmes. Our meeting schedule is informed by operator performance data — we know which companies are moving volume in South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania, and we prioritise accordingly.
Before every meeting, we brief ourselves thoroughly on your property's current news, availability windows, rate changes and any operational updates. After every meeting, we report back to you on feedback received, consultant sentiment and any commercial intelligence gathered. You always know exactly what is being said about your property in the UK market.
Training sessions
Beyond individual meetings, we conduct group training sessions for travel agency teams and operator training days. These can be conducted in-person at agency offices, virtually, or as part of a wider training event. A well-delivered training session can move your property from unknown to actively recommended across an entire consultant team in a single morning.
- In-agency training — visiting operator and agency offices to present your property to their full Africa team
- Virtual webinars — conducting online training sessions for operators with remote or distributed teams
- Event training — presenting at operator training days, ATTA events and trade gatherings
- Destination evenings — organising or participating in destination-focused evenings bringing together multiple properties