Namibia Lures New Travelers Seeking Desert Solitude

On Experience

Colin Nagy is a marketing strategist and writes on customer-centric experiences and innovation across the luxury sector, hotels, aviation, and beyond. You can read all of his writing here.

Namibia has had an incredible run in the press recently. There have been deep-dive features in glossy consumer travel magazines, a callout by the Wall Street Journal as a top-10 intriguing destination for 2019, lots of influencer chatter, and a smattering of new openings from established safari operators like Natural Selection and Wilderness Safaris, among others.

At a quick glance, it looks like the tourism board is surfing some nice waves and benefiting from the sometimes-fickle preferences of global-travel opinion makers. But the desert country, located on the southwestern coast of Africa, has been successfully setting the stage for some time, and now its ascent is the direct result of these efforts. Moreover, Namibia's appeal sits squarely within the trend of today's travelers wanting not only to break away from well-trodden destinations but also seek out visually unique natural landscapes.

First off, the demographics of travelers visiting Namibia have been changing. What was previously a destination frequented primarily by Europeans is now finding favor with Americans and travelers from farther afield.