Chiefs Tented Camps has set a record by building the largest luxury camp ever set up inside a Big Five reserve, at this level of luxury, with no infrastructure to draw on.
Chiefs Tented Camps record-breaking setup in Big Five Reserve
Created to host the All Blacks’ recent South African tour, Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry, the camp saw 485 tents, including 320 en-suite Cottage Suites, erected on a completely undeveloped site at Mongena Private Game Reserve to accommodate more than 800 guests.
The camp was conceptualised and executed in partnership with Old School Group, with assistance from Mongena’s professional team.
The numbers behind the build are unprecedented for a mobile camp: 3,238m² of communal canvas, 2.7km of electrical cable, 1.5km of water piping, 2.2km of electric fencing, 160kVA of power, 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 entire camp was dismantled, and the land returned to exactly the state it had been found in.
Important milestone
The build lands in a milestone year: 2026 marks 30 years since Chiefs Tented Camps began operating in South Africa, the same year the All Blacks first competed in the inaugural Tri-Nations series against the Springboks.
It’s taken every one of those 30 years to make a build of this scale possible, according to Executive Director and Co-Founder Lysta Stander.
“Nearly 30 years of doing this creates a kind of muscle memory,” says Stander.
“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. Experience gives you the confidence to create a camp at this scale and level, but it also teaches you that there is never room for complacency.” Stander says.
That confidence is reshaping how Chiefs positions itself to the DMCs, corporates and event planners who commission builds like this one.
“It means the conversation can start with the experience rather than the venue,” Stander explains. “Instead of asking ‘where can we find enough rooms?’, the starting point can be ‘where would we love to take these people?’ From there, the camp is shaped around the location, the group and what they want to achieve.” Stander said
In other words, Chiefs is the destination: wherever the camp goes, that is where the experience is.
Creating unique experiences
For an industry used to choosing a venue and hoping it’s memorable enough, that’s a fundamentally different starting point. And, for incentive and event planners under pressure to deliver something delegates haven’t already experienced, an increasingly persuasive one.
“The scale may have been worlds apart, but the approach wasn’t,” says Allan Johnston, Executive Director and Co-Founder.
The range on offer is part of the story too. While the Mongena build was under construction, Chiefs was simultaneously running its 15th-anniversary Namaqua Flower Beach Camp nearly 1,500 kilometres away on the Atlantic coast, a seasonal tented camp open for just one month a year, with room for only 30 guests.
“Every guest deserves the same attention to detail, warm hospitality and a team that cares about their experience.” Johnston said.
Few operators can credibly claim both ends of that spectrum at once: an 800-guest landmark build and an intimate camp that never hosts more than 30, run in parallel with the same precision.
Light Eco-Footprint
There’s a sustainability story embedded in the achievement as well. Chiefs’ entire model is built on a leave-no-trace principle: everything that arrives by truck leaves the same way. “The breakdown is part of the thinking from the very beginning,” Stander notes.
“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. For a build of this size, in a reserve this sensitive, that’s no small claim. At this scale we are not building a camp; we are building a small city with all the required services.”
Capacity is Key
Stander says the question she’d most want asked about the Mongena build isn’t about the tent count at all.
“What was here before you arrived? Because that’s really the story. The finished photographs show this enormous luxury camp. What they don’t show is the open landscape before the first truck arrived, or that same landscape again after the last truck left.” She said.
Capacity is directly linked to mobility acording to Stander. That means luxury tented camps can be set up almost anywhere.
“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.” Stander said.
Having just built its largest camp ever inside a Big Five reserve, Chiefs is already being asked a different question by the DMCs and planners watching: not what it can build, but where it could build next.
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