With Courage Into Places Not For Everyone
94 POSITIV
STYL
Martin, the Czech market is full of travel agencies.
How is the Expedition Club different?
Our motto, “With courage into places not for
everyone”, is both a filter and an invitation. We organise
outdoor expeditions and journeys with an emphasis
on small groups, a personal approach, and authentic
experiences. Our guides are enthusiasts who create
their own trips and lead them not because they have
to, but because they genuinely want to go there
themselves.
Does that mean that sometimes the guide is visiting
the destination for the first time?
Yes. That’s a conscious decision. We don’t want
package tours cut from the same template. If a guide
has the desire and the skills, we encourage them to go
and explore. This creates a unique energy of shared
discovery. But our guides are always highly trained
and experienced. They complete specialised courses
to know how to respond in mountain environments
or crisis situations, and they bring with them a wealth
of experience.
Sometimes you really do head to the ends of the
earth. Which expeditions do you like to look back on?
This year we landed in Antarctica, completing our final
continent. Once again, we wanted to include a very
specific experience – so we sailed there on a yacht,
as sailors, to heighten the sense of the journey. But such
extreme trips make up only about 25% of our offer;
the rest are standard expeditions. By that we mean, for
example, trekking in Tajikistan, Bolivia or the Balkans.
If we had to name a typical example – our benchmark
of what we do – it would be treks in Central Asia. That’s
where we feel the greatest sense of freedom, space,
and authenticity. And that is the essence we want
to share with people.
And what has been a wow moment for me recently?
Definitely the ascent of Africa’s third-highest mountain
– Margherita Peak in Uganda. The route there crosses
the continent’s largest glacier. Along the way you pass
through every climate zone – starting in the jungle,
moving into wetlands, walking past trees with two-
metre lichens like something out of The Lord of the
Rings, then continuing across alpine meadows up onto
the glacier itself. Often you trek in wellies, sometimes
knee-deep in mud, and then, at over four thousand
metres, you change into crampons for the ice. It’s
an absolutely incredible experience – the kind
of journey that you never forget.
Despite the variety of destinations and the difficulty
of the expeditions, you maintain strong demand.
What drives that?
I believe it’s mainly the community of participants
and guides – we’ve built a fantastic group. It’s also
because we deliberately keep the number of expeditions
limited, given the complexity of organising them.
As a result, awareness of the Expedition Club grows
faster than the number of trips. We travel to more than
120 destinations, and around 30% of the expeditions
are refreshed each year. Every journey has its own story.
Group size is capped at a maximum of 10 participants.
For more demanding expeditions, we also take into
Group dynamics are key –
the atmosphere of an expedion comes
from people, not the desnaon.