Digital Transformation Stories
A Look at Governors’ Camp
Opened in January 1972, Governors' Camp was the first parmanent luxury tented camp in Africa and features among the top hotels of the world today.
Governors’ Camp Spec Sheet
3 Locations  |  6 Camps  |  40 Activities 500 Employees  |  70 Vehicles  | 2 Aircrafts
The Challenge
Governors’ Camp used paper for everything from vehicle rotas to invoicing, alongside an unreliable, on-premises email system. For Governors’ Camp, running multiple, simultaneous safaris in the Kenyan and Rwandan wilderness turned core operations, such as invoicing and resource allocation, into daily challenges. By 2015, it was clear that even the existing email solution based on on-premises servers was no longer fit for the purpose.
The company’s 4 email servers would go down around every 10 days, causing serious disruption, especially on weekends.
Since 1975, they collected credit invoices in a Nairobi warehouse, put them in a mailbag in a truck, and hoped that they made it to the Mara without getting wet or worse. Then the invoices would be distributed to 4 different properties and 10 different departments to be signed and approved, before being returned to Nairobi in a mailbag again. The entire process could take four to six weeks, sometimes longer.
The Solution
Dominic Grammaticas, the Managing Director, spoke BusinessCom Solutions Africa about a more formal solution, implementing Google Workspace across the company. Dominic and his team recognized the potential of Google Workspace to deliver a more stable, central platform for all communications.
Google Workspace collaboration tools readily adopted, such as Google Meet, which now accounts for around half of the company’s communications.
In the three years since the switch, Governors’ Camp reports zero downtime on its email and other systems, and all but one of its on-premises servers has been decommissioned, minimizing maintenance. With a Google Workspace account for every driver one can check availability and arrange transport anytime from anywhere. You can add in notes, too, about particular requirements of guests, such as language, snack preferences, or their itinerary, or tell drivers to pick up other passengers on their routes, to make the most of available resources. When an invoice requires approval, it is uploaded to Drive, then moved from one folder to the next by the designated people. Since each of those people can only take part using his or her Google Workspace login and password, if a document has moved through a confidential set of Google Drive folders, it must have been approved by the relevant people.
The Result
Cuts the invoice approval process down to hours instead of 6 weeks or more.
Enhanced email reliability with zero downtime in more than 3 years.
Coordinates 70 vehicles and 2 planes with Google Calendar and Google Meet.
Governors’ Camp has won over 15 awards in the tourism sector including being nominated as ‘Kenya’s Leading Safari Camp Brand’ in the 2022 World Travel Awards and ranked #14 in Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards 2022 TOP 15 RESORTS IN EAST AFRICA.
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