Some places change how you see the world. Our work, decades later, is making sure they are still there for someone else to be changed by.

By Richard Walker • Director, Anna Walker Travel

A First Taste of the Wild

I was fourteen years old when I first visited Kenya on a three-day safari with my father, just the two of us before Christmas, tied onto the end of a business trip he had in Nairobi. Although fleeting, it’s a holiday I’ve never forgotten, partly because it was our first father-and-son trip abroad to somewhere completely different, partly because I returned home with a tummy bug serious enough to be rushed to the Tropical Diseases Unit on Christmas Eve (I recovered in time for Christmas Day!). Mostly, though, because it opened my eyes to the wonder of the wild.

Ahead of our trip, I remember looking forward to seeing the wildlife in their own territory, but I hadn’t given any thought to the views, the sounds or the smells I’d encounter, and I’ve never forgotten them. Nothing prepares you for seeing a black-maned lion at close range for the first time or watching a pride feeding on the carcass of a zebra a few yards from where you sit. Watching, listening to and admiring those animals in their own world, and feeling the sheer scale of the landscape around them, made me feel insignificant in a way I couldn’t explain at the age of fourteen, but I knew I had to come back again someday.

That trip got me hooked on travel and where it can take you.

Coming Back to Africa

Fast forward sixteen years, and Kenya returned to the centre of my life in 2008, when Anna and I got married in Laikipia. Wedding days are always defining occasions in anyone’s life, but ours was made even more special when, after we had said our vows to each other, an elephant called from the valley below, totally unscripted. That night, our guests were treated to a sky filled with so many stars that it genuinely felt as though we were lying under a blanket of them.

In 2012, I joined Diageo from SABMiller, which led to regular travel across east and west Africa including Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. Those market visits gave me something I’ve come to value enormously, which was the simple pleasure of being somewhere new and having the opportunity to witness and experience different cultures in a way that no guidebook could ever capture. I guess you could say I became increasingly passionate about wanting to understand a place and its people, rather than just simply visit it.

When Sustainability Took Hold

In my early forties, sustainability stopped being a thing I read about and became something I found myself caring about and wanting to work on directly. In 2019, I joined HiPP, the family-owned German organic baby food company, which is the only business I’ve encountered where environmental commitment genuinely runs through the structural veins of the company. Working there changed how I read other companies’ claims on sustainability. The long-term partnerships with organic farmers, the soil quality monitoring, the willingness to bear costs that competitors wouldn’t, the deliberately slow pace of innovation, the standards of animal welfare, no other company came close.

Over the same period, I watched how Anna’s sister Lippa and her husband Tarquin had gradually and successfully changed a landscape through active community partnership, building what is now a thriving conservancy alongside a flourishing safari lodge in the Maasai Mara. Seeing their determination and dedication, despite numerous setbacks, to ultimately build something rooted in conservation, preservation and restoration in genuine partnership with the local Maasai community, made me realise how important sustainability, in its broadest sense, was to me. I decided then to try and weave it into my work however I could.

“Thoughtful travel, properly understood, is not just a marketing position. It is a series of small operational decisions, made consistently, that add up to a different kind of journey both for the traveller and for the place.”

Why It Matters Now

Setting up and building Anna Walker Travel is the first time the two things I’m personally passionate about, travel and sustainability, have lived in the same business for me. Anna brings twenty-five years of Africa and Indian Ocean expertise, and the deep knowledge and relationships that come with it. I bring twenty-five years across global consumer brands, and a low tolerance for the gap between what businesses say and what they actually do. What we are determined to build together is a firm commitment to designing journeys that celebrate and support the operators working ethically to protect, conserve and restore Africa’s landscapes and biodiversity and the communities that live within them.

That commitment is also why we recently became members of the Conscious Travel Foundation. Joining was a decision to be held to a standard publicly that we already hold ourselves to privately. The Foundation brings together a small, considered network of travel related businesses that take the harder questions seriously - about community benefit, conservation funding, supply-chain transparency, and the gap between sustainability as a claim and sustainability as a practice. Membership commits us to those conversations in a structured way, alongside peers we genuinely respect. It also means we are accountable, in public, for how we help answer them.

Africa and the Indian Ocean are extraordinary precisely because so many people have worked, and continue to work, to keep them that way. The lodges that protect a watershed, the conservancies that have made wildlife more valuable than livestock or the marine programmes restoring reefs one section at a time. Our role, as a small company designing thoughtful journeys for a small number of clients each year, is to make sure those operators are the ones receiving our clients and the revenue that comes with them.

Thoughtful travel, in the end, is mostly a discipline of choosing well, on behalf of people who are trusting you to choose well. It’s the elephant calling from the valley, and the question of who, decades from now, will still be there to hear it. Both things matter and our work is in keeping them connected.

Richard Walker

Director, Anna Walker Travel

Thoughtful travel, tailored to you.