Cameron here, co-founder of The Explorer Society.

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The world seems a little messed up at the moment. Fuel shortages, blockades, inflation: It can all seem a little overwhelming.

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But, let’s be frank: The world has always been a little messed up, in equal parts awful and wonderful. All that changes is the type of messiness.

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I just wanted to reach out to you to explain what this ridiculous situation in Iran means for travel, for you and for us. We have had a few Society members reach out to us over the past month or so about how it was affecting us, or how it would affect their travel dreams. We have always been transparent and upfront with our Society members, as seen in our annual Gear Checks at the end of the year, and I thought that maybe a catch up was overdue.

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The Short Term

The shortage of fuel worldwide has caused fuel prices to spike, quite dramatically. This isn’t the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last. That has had a knock-on effect to the cost of operations across the destinations we visit, from light aircraft flights in Africa to transit costs in South America. In many cases, operators have been forced to swallow financial losses or implement fuel surcharges to cover these increased costs of operations. As per our company values, to date we have absorbed these costs on behalf of our travellers already booked with us.

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Despite the headlines though, travel is still ongoing, and with the exception of the Middle East, largely undisrupted. We have travellers all over the world at the moment, enjoying themselves. Getting to the destination is the challenge, particularly if travelling via the Middle East on carriers like Qatar or Emirates, not the travel in the destination itself. It’s been lucky for us the vast majority of our travellers use other routings to visit Southern Africa, South America and the polar regions, and those that didn’t and who are travelling in the coming months, we have worked with them to shift their flights to unaffected corridors. The fact remains though that once you have arrived safely in your destination, via whatever routing you take, nothing has really changed. Penguins still squawk, lions still roar and historical monuments still continue to remain old and impressive.

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There is one more thing that I really wanted to point out.

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The Long Term

No-one really knows what the long term effect of this situation will be, or how long it will go on for. We are not too concerned though, from a business perspective at least. We are alert and focused on the day to day, and acutely aware of our travellers, but not panicked about what the media seems to want us to be panicked about. The fact remains that we have been doing this for a long time, and if there is one thing that you count on in the travel business, it’s that there will always be a crisis. Before we founded The Explorer Society we led travel businesses through Ebola, SARS, international terrorism incidents and global financial crashes.

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We founded The Explorer Society during Covid, one of the most extreme disruptions this century, and have since managed election riots and extreme weather events. We have had travellers with medical emergencies and minor mishaps, and during these past three months alone have been busy with Zimbabwean tax changes, Kenya park fee amendments and fuel surcharges. And, over the coming months, I’m sure even more fuel surcharges will filter through the system, but for as long as sustainably possible we will continue to absorb these additional costs for our travellers. We wouldn’t be able to do this without strong and solid foundations in place.

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What I am trying to say is, these disruptions are part of the cycle.

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There’s also another reason we aren’t too worried about it. I don’t think I’ve ever discussed this widely, but when we first started this travel company, Martin (my co-founder) and I had a long chat about life goals. Part of the discussion was a frank conversation about what we ideally wanted out of this company. Did we want to buy a fancy car with company profits, or did we want to earn enough to retire in 5 years? Or, did we want to be the biggest and most profitable travel company in the world and sit in board rooms all day?

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The answer, to all of those questions, was no.

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That kind of ‘business success’ has never been the point. We aren’t interested in taking the company public and cashing out. We aren’t interested in taking anything out of the Society, but rather interested in what the company can become by itself. Growth at any sake isn’t something a good business does, its something a cancer does. Unlike a growth-focused business or shareholder company that sees this current situation as a massive threat to their profits, we are just growing quietly in the background, whilst navigating the ever-changing waves of disruption.

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Having achieved strong growth over recent years, and despite a list of future travellers longer than ever before, we continue to know our travellers individually by name, not just a number. Our aim, quite simply, is to help people have amazing travel experiences. That’s what we love to do ourselves, and successfully doing that for others means that we can also continue to see more of this amazing world. And the more delighted our travellers are, then the more like-minded team members we can bring into the company to then delight even more travellers. That’s the point of what we do, not to see numbers tick up on a spreadsheet.

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So, the long and short of it is, travel is still ongoing despite the headlines. We are still working with our current explorers and with new travellers, even as I write these words. For us, that’s the dream. For our explorers, that’s their travel dream. And if you think that a badly planned and ineffective war that has affected the world economy will stop us doing what we love, tell them to keep dreaming.

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Safe travels,

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Cameron