Our sole purpose every day is to inspire you from our vast array of travel products to create the ultimate leisure experience. No matter if you wish to explore Africa by going on an elephant safari, climb the Drakensberg or canoe down the Orange River; or simply sip tea under the shadow of Table Mountain, laze on a beach or dance the night away at a local music festival, we have something for you.

We have brought together a team of dedicated people to provide you with a host of fresh ideas to re-energise your body, rejuvenate your soul and most importantly, save you time.

We are here to serve you:

• the customer: with the best deals possible.
• the supplier: with a first-class online shop to showcase your products.
• the employee: by offering an exciting and fresh approach to work.
• the shareholder: to yield maximum return with an acceptable level of risk.

We embrace a culture of shared responsibility, authenticity and imagination. Join our community of artists, writers and storytellers for a holiday experience that starts with the first click on our site. africado.com offers unlimited possibilities first time every time.

There is a lot to do in South Africa, it is just a shame that it is not easier to find and book. At africado.com, we want the search and purchasing process to be fun and effortless. Why comb the internet looking for that quaint guest house? What can you do that's within close proximity to your hotel?

At africado.com we know where everything is. This goes for our products, services, customers and suppliers. It then becomes a matter of what is where in relation to your needs, be that your hotel, the airport or the activities you wish to indulge in. Whether you are looking for a hotel room within walking distance from your convention centre, a wine tour within a taxi ride from your spa treatment or an elephant safari within a half an hour's drive of your game lodge, we can provide you with a list of suitable options to satisfy your requirements.

Our products from July 2009 will include hotels and game lodges as well as access to over 1000 events taking place in South Africa over the coming months. From September 2009, we will significantly expand our inventory providing additional products as well as more accommodation and our piece de resistance, our experience booking engine. We will be the first in South Africa to aggregate experiences such as wind surfing, wine tours and white shark diving, so that they can be booked and paid for in real time online.

So fasten your seat belts and join us on this adventure.

One fine day more than 4 years ago, on a white sandy beach in Barbados, Grant Edwards dreamt of creating a world class one stop travel shop. He despised looking for anything, in fact, when he needed a screwdriver and could not find one, he would go to the local hardware store to purchase one. As a result, after 8 years, he has landed up with 10 replicas of the exactly the same tool! We digress! Grant wanted to take the hassle out of searching for the perfect hotel or the ultimate mountain biking trail and as a result he decided to give up his well paid job in London and move to Cape Town in February 2006, to get the ball rolling.

He asked a colleague from Lastminute.com, Grant R to assist with his technical expertise and a friend, Rees, with 10 years investment banking experience, also from London to join him. Oh, and he persuaded his long suffering wife and mother-in-law to also ditch their jobs!

africado.com started in earnest in January 2008 with 3 full-time employees. Business plans were written and re-written, the tourist market as well as banking and payment gateway facilities extensively researched, and various information technology frameworks investigated. A survey was conducted, several africado.com brand concepts discussed and many suppliers consulted. Ideas were bounced off all who would listen, to ensure that our site would be innovative and fun, relevant to the South African market place and most importantly be able to add value to you, the traveller.

We started to trade in July 2009 with hotel accommodation and events information.We have great plans to expand our inventory over the coming months, so please WATCH THIS SPACE!

Our goal is to provide you with an inspirational leisure experience each time you visit our site.

The Pebbles Project is a registered non-profit organisation working with children living on wine farms and in townships in the Western Cape of South Africa. The organisation's purpose is to enrich the lives of children from disadvantaged backgrounds with special educational needs, especially those whose lives are affected by alcohol, through providing support and training to local wine farm and township crèches and establishing after-school provision for older children living in the Winelands.

Pebbles is currently supporting the education of over 500 children, aged from 3 months to 18 years. The organisation's original aim was to support informal day-care mothers who looked after the children of wine farm workers during the day, but this has now grown into developing a complete training programme for crèche staff (both through group training sessions and on-site support), providing a range of educational materials, toys and games, and taking the children aged 3 - 6 years out on an educational trip every month. Each crèche is supplied with a library of books, outdoor play equipment, art and craft resources and furniture such as cots, mattresses, blankets and towels as needed. The crèche children also benefit from a mobile toy library, which visits each farm once a fortnight for the children to choose a toy that they can take home to play with. The children are so excited about this opportunity, as many of them do not possess a toy of their own, and now get the chance to play with a brand new toy every two weeks. Through this play the children can develop many educational and social skills as well as simply having fun.

After a period of working only with the younger children, Pebbles realised the vital need for after-school support for the older children aged 6 - 18, many of whom would wander around the farm unsupervised all afternoon while their parents worked, with no-one to help with homework, and no meaningful activities to keep them occupied. This led to the setting up of after-school clubs on the farms, which have created a number of jobs for unemployed people living on the farms as well as providing libraries, supervised homework programmes, art lessons, drama workshops, music lessons and a lifeskills programme. The impact of these after-school clubs has been huge - the children are showing improved school grades and there has been a noticeable reduction in children dropping out of school. The after-school club children also benefit from a monthly educational trip to exciting venues such as Table Mountain, Monkey town, Giraffe House, MTN Science Centre - trips that they not only love, but are also used as behaviour and attendance incentives in the clubs.

In addition to the work with the crèches and after-school clubs, Pebbles supports the parents of the children by providing 4 workshops per year on all of the farms, covering a range of topics such as Money Management, Personal Development, Parenting Skills, Substance Abuse, HIV/AIDS and TB. These workshops enable the parents to learn new skills as well as developing better parenting styles.

Pebbles has developed a range of fundraising packages to enable supporters to get involved financially in a variety of ways. One of the most impactful is the Sponsor a Child programme, where individuals can sponsor an individual child. The monthly donation does not go directly to the child as it is used to enable Pebbles to provide the staff training, recourses and educational trips for the whole crèche, thus benefiting many more children. Where a child may have specific special needs, the sponsorship money is used for therapy or treatment as required. The Pebbles Sponsor A School Pack enables donors to contribute the cost of providing all the necessary clothes and stationery that a young child needs to start Grade 1 of school, ensuring their school career begins on a really positive note.

For more information about the work of Pebbles, please visit their website. Should you wish to personally contact the The Pebbles Project Trust:
Director: Sophia Warner - email or Contact number: +27 72 472 2797

Grant has fifteen years of experience in the technology world. He has spent the last decade working in London for companies such as Vodafone, DHL and lastminute.com. While working for lastminute.com, in both a technical and managerial capacity, he obtained a wealth of experience in the online travel sector. Of the roles fulfilled by him during his tenure at lastminute.com, it is the role of Connectivity Architect that has the most bearing on his current business venture. In this role he was instrumental in defining, designing and managing world wide corporate hotel integrations into the lastminute.com platform. Integrations into other travel portals such as Travelocity were also part of his remit. Grant returned to South Africa in 2006 with the intention of starting up africado.com.

Grant divides his leisure time between tiring out his 2 young sons and dreaming up marketing ideas for africado.com. Grant's favourite holiday involved taking 3 months off work to go to Whistler in Canada to feel the pleasure of the pure white snow beneath his feet. He adores snowboarding and one of his goals is to make africado.com so successful, so that he can take another 3 months off to do exactly the same thing!

Rees has extensive experience in management and strategy having worked for 10 years in investment banking in London at Dealogic, the dominant player in providing capital markets software worldwide. His tenure there included managing core software for the Google flotation as well as software for most major privatisations and new share issues globally, including Deutsche Telecom, Air China, HBOS, Casio, and Tesco. Prior to this he worked for Transtech, a UK based company, where he wrote software for their range of massively parallel computers supplied to the US navy. Rees holds a Master of Science Degree (Computer Science) from Rhodes University.

Rees loves to spend his free time in August rushing between shows at the Edinburgh Festival and looks forward to Shakespeare for Breakfast every year. His guiltiest pleasure is a daily quota of Green and Black's almond chocolate.

Andrea has more than 15 years experience in the financial services industry. In South Africa, while at Ginsburg Malan and Carsons, she worked as a Client Relationship Manager. She was also involved in the opening of the Carousel, a Sun International casino, supervising a guest relations team. In 1995, Andrea left South Africa for London and joined State Street, an American custodian bank, where she headed a team of analysts for one of their most prominent UK clients, the Wellcome Trust. She formed part of a core team who successfully implemented State Street's first global assets performance measurement system. In 2002, she joined the Bank Of New York Mellon. As Head of the Client Management Group (Mellon Analytical Solutions), she managed several teams of performance and research analysts, project managers as well as client relationship consultants for several large clients such as the National Bank of Kazakhstan and Russell Investments. Andrea holds an economics degree from Stellenbosch University.

Andrea enjoys building umpteen sand castles on the beach nearby which her sons delight in knocking down. She has a passion for tennis having spent many days overnighting on the pavement outside the All England Tennis Club to catch a game on centre court.

Grant has 19 years experience in the IT sector. His first foray into online hotel bookings was in 1996/7 when he prototyped a Java based internet enabled booking system, the ancestor of to-day's eRes System, a dominant player in South Africa. In London, Grant subsequently worked as an integral team member in delivering, BBC's NewsOnline. He then took up the position as Head of Architecture at lastminute.com, one of Europe's most successful on-line travel retailers. After three years at lastminute.com, Grant joined Hutchison 3G UK (Three), a mobile phone operator, as Head of Product Design and Development. Grant returned to South Africa several years ago, where he worked as a consultant at Atos Origin, one of Europe's largest system integrators. He currently is employed at Ericsson as Strategic Solutions Manager for 43 countries in Sub Saharan Africa including DRC, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Angola and Uganda. Grant acts as a technical advisor to africado.com and is currently studying at the University of Cape Town's Business School for his MBA.

Grant's favourite travel moment was seeing Machu Picchu for the first time which he describes as an awe-inspiring, spiritual moment. He likes to spend his free time on 'geeky stuff' and pizza gorging.