For private groups · direct booking · 6 to 12 travellers

Travel with us — book directly, in a small private group

For travellers who would rather work with us than through an intermediary.

Most of our work is for tour operators, presses, and institutions. A smaller share — but a significant one — is for individuals and small private groups who book us directly. This is the page for them: the menu of our programmes, the way direct booking works, the pricing approach, the answer to the question of who this is right for.

Who direct booking is for

The profile of travellers who reach us directly

Our direct-booking travellers tend to share a profile. They are typically diaspora travellers researching their own ancestry on the former Slave Coast — third-generation African American, Afro-Brazilian, Caribbean — who want a specific accompaniment that mass-market operators do not provide. They are scholar travellers, writers, artists, museum donors travelling on their own time outside their institution's programmes. They are retired couples or professional couples with deep cultural interest and the time to travel for two to three weeks. They are repeat West Africa travellers who have been before, who want to go deeper than the first time allowed.

Direct booking is right for travellers who want to work directly with the people who will be operating the ground. It is not right for travellers looking for the cheapest West Africa programme on the internet; our pricing is firm, and we do not compete with budget operators. It is also not right for travellers who want extensive consumer-facing handholding (24/7 concierge, app-based itineraries, gamified experiences); our service architecture is human, conversational, and slow-paced by design.

The menu

Our four core programmes, plus eight festival circuits

Plus the eight festival circuits — Vodun Days, Porto-Novo Mask Festival, PANAFEST, Hogbetsotso, Agbogbo-Za, Fetu Afahye, Evala — each running on the festival's annual calendar.

Pricing

Per-group, never per-person on a list

Festival circuits with fixed dates, such as Vodun Days 2027, have a published per-person price. Every other journey is quoted to your specific group based on size, dates, accommodation tier, festival coordination if applicable, and degree of customisation. Discovery call first, written proposal within 48 hours, contract within a week of acceptance.

For working frames: the 5-day Voodoo Discovery is the most accessible of our programmes; the 7-day Voyage Vodun and the 6-day festival circuits sit above it; the 10-day Custom and the festival circuits with high access requirements (Vodun Days, PANAFEST) sit higher still; the 12-day former Slave Coast journey is the most invested of our standard programmes. Figures are set out in the written proposal.

A discovery call before anything else.

Forty-five minutes. No obligation. If the fit is not right, we will say so and direct you to a colleague we trust.