Chiefs Tented Camps has built a 485-tent luxury camp at Mongena Private Game Reserve in South Africa to host more than 800 guests on the All Blacks’ recent tour.
For destination management companies and corporate event planners, the build shows a mobile camp operating at the scale of a large hotel on a site with no existing infrastructure. Chiefs says the model lets it shape a camp around the destination and the client’s brief.
The camp was created for the tour Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry and included 320 en-suite Cottage Suites. Chiefs describes it as the largest luxury camp ever built inside a Big Five reserve at this level of luxury. It was conceived and delivered in partnership with Old School Group, with assistance from Mongena’s team.
The company built 3,238m² of communal canvas, 2.7km of electrical cable, 1.5km of water piping, 2.2km of electric fencing, and 160kVA of power. It cites roughly 27,000 person-hours of labour, 11,230 meals served and close to 900,000 litres of water trucked onsite.
When the tour ended, the camp was dismantled and the land returned to the state in which it was found. Everything that arrives by truck leaves the same way, according to Chiefs.
“The breakdown is part of the thinking from the very beginning,” said Lysta Stander, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Chiefs Tented Camps. “You arrive at an open piece of land, and gradually an entire little world takes shape. Then it all comes down, and the site returns to what it was before.”
The build comes in the year Chiefs marks 30 years of operating in South Africa. The All Blacks first competed against the Springboks in the inaugural Tri-Nations series in 1996.
“Nearly 30 years of doing this creates a kind of muscle memory,” Stander said. “There is no substitute for having had boots on the ground, learning to read a site, adapting when plans change and solving problems as they happen, because they will happen.”
Stander said the scale changes how Chiefs speaks to clients. “It means the conversation can start with the experience rather than the venue,” she said. “Instead of asking ‘where can we find enough rooms?’, the starting point can be ‘where would we love to take these people?’”
While the Mongena camp was under construction, Chiefs ran its 15th-anniversary Namaqua Flower Beach Camp about 1,500km away on the Atlantic coast. The seasonal camp is open for one month a year and takes only 30 guests.
“The scale may have been worlds apart, but the approach wasn’t,” said Allan Johnston, Executive Director and Co-Founder. “Every guest deserves the same attention to detail, warm hospitality and a team that cares about their experience.”
“Our capacity is directly linked to our mobility,” Stander said. “We’re not tied to a fixed number of rooms, a permanent venue or even a particular style of camp. The camp can be designed around the destination and the brief.”
Chiefs says DMCs and planners are already asking where it could build next.
