Afritrip, the holding company for the luxury online tour operators faced legal action from South African National Parks who own Kruger National Park. This was due to Afritrip owning the Krugerpark.com domain which SANParks had a legal claim to as it was the name of their business. Losing the Krugerpark.com domain would cost Afritrip nearly 80% of their business.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place , Afritrip had to search for an alternative domain,when then CEO Ric Meulemans came across Safari.com. COO Alexis Boshoff said: “It was just this dormant placeholder website with a few safari listings. Nothing had changed on the site since the ’90s."
Afritrip decided to buy the domain but was now faced with the challenge of finding the owner of the domain and harder yet convincing the owner to sell.The domain first registered in 1992, has since then turned down offers from Apple - whose web browser is called Safari - and Ralph Lauren, which makes Safari cologne for men.
Afritrip enlisted US private investigator Dan Hurley to conduct a further investigation, to track down the owner and start negotiations for Safari.com. Negotiations went on until March with an improved offer of R5-and R10-million and a fully paid safari holiday sealing the deal. The sale took effect in June.“We took ownership of the Safari.com domain about a week before we had to give up Krugerpark.com,” said Boshoff
“The purchase of the Safari.com domain will allow extensive operations to all parts of Africa and is no longer focused primarily in South Africa; this allows customers who are arranging trips to book any and all African Safaris with Safari.com.”
The company has grown from bringing visitors to the Kruger National Park and South African National Parks properties to bringing visitors to all national parks in Africa in 2017.