The COVID-19 crisis has undoubtedly presented us all with the challenge of learning how to sustain ourselves. In the tourism industry we have experienced huge losses and a massive decline in the number of travellers, which has forced us to make some necessary decisions regarding rightsizing our business.

How to weather the storm?

In order to ride out this wave it is imperative that we restructure our business and take steps to become a smaller, more agile and flexible business. In order to do this we took the decision to end the marketing, reservations and/or management agreements we had in place with some of our lodges. 

As we progress with our recovery journey the following changes are part of our strategic restructure:

• The River Lodge will be returning to the owners who will market and manage it themselves.  All existing bookings will remain in place.
• The marketing for Shumbalala Game Lodge and Nkaya Lodge will return to the individual owners; the respective owners will continue to operate their lodges. All existing bookings for these lodges will remain in place.
• The owners of Serondella and Monwana Lodge have decided to use this time to undertake exciting renovations and refurbishments of their lodges. It is envisaged that they will re-open in the second half of 2021. Until that time we will honour all future reservations by way of a transfer to an alternative, comparable lodge.
• We do not envision reopening Chapungu or Waterside, but again we will honour all future reservations by way of a transfer to an alternative, comparable lodge.

We regard it as “rightsizing”

We are dedicating our full attention to the lodges that we have reopened and will continue to operate and market, keeping our focus on what we do best at these lodges.

This “rightsizing” strategy will see us open the following lodges during 2020 and 2021:

• Saseka Tented Camp
• Thornybush Game Lodge
• Simbambili Game Lodge
• Jackalberry Lodge

Thank you for your support

We are extremely grateful for your understanding and continued support during this restructure. Change is never easy, but knowing we have loyal followers is a huge source of comfort for us. We have never been ones to shy away from a challenge, and we are excited to move forward with a smaller business model which we can pour all our energy and resources into. Thank you for your continued commitment to Thornybush and our entire team.