What do you get when you combine a major love of golf with a lifelong passion for Africa? Meet Matt McCreedy, founder of The Safari Golfer. His tailor-made experiences bring together exceptional golf, unforgettable wildlife and beautifully chosen places to stay, with plenty of adventure along the way.

Let’s delve a little deeper into what makes Matt tick:

Matt, let’s start at the beginning: where did your love of Africa and golf come from, and when did you realise the two could make such a brilliant combination?

The African bush is something we South Africans are fortunate to have on our doorstep. My childhood holidays included trips to Kruger National Park and Botswana’s Mashatu Game Reserve, and when the time came to leave, I was always having to be dragged out. I wanted more time in nature, at an unhurried pace, long before I had the word for it.

Golf came from my father, who taught me at a very young age. For the first few years I played right-handed, using his clubs, until he noticed me turning them the other way round because it felt more natural, and realised I was actually a lefty. Golf took a back seat through school and university, and it was only once I started working at the safari camps that I picked the game up again properly, using my time on leave to play. Working in those camps, meeting people from all over the world, golf came up in most conversations. Guests either loved the game, lived on a golf estate, or were just taking it up. But every time I mentioned golf in South Africa, the answer was always the same: we’re just here for safari, maybe one day we’ll come back and play golf. Blending the two was never presented to them as an option. The idea that they belonged together didn’t arrive as one single moment.

It built up slowly, over years spent working across some of Africa’s best safari properties, watching how much a genuine host changes an experience, and realising that golf, at its best, asks for exactly the same kind of focus a leopard needs to hunt. Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it, and The Safari Golfer is really just the result of finally putting the two together properly.

You’ve spent years working in some of Africa’s most exceptional properties. What have those experiences taught you about what makes a truly memorable luxury travel experience?

Working across those properties taught me that luxury in this part of the world was never really about thread counts or plunge pools, although those certainly help. It’s about presence, and that presence starts long before a guest ever arrives. It’s the planning done properly: knowing the right place to be and the right time of year to be there, working out every piece of logistics between one location and the next so that nothing is left for the guest to solve themselves. It’s about the client being treated as an individual, not a number. Some of that came down to something as simple as sitting at the table.

I once had dinner with a couple in the middle of the Okavango Delta that turned into a genuine friendship, not the polite kind that ends when the trip does. I’ve since stayed with them in America, and we still message each other every week. That’s not something logistics alone can produce; it comes from actually taking the time to sit down and listen. Someone on the ground knew exactly when the light was right for a sundowner, knew a guest well enough to anticipate what they needed before they had to ask, and made every detail disappear so completely that they never had to think about logistics at all.

With everything handled from start to finish, a guest simply arrives and enjoys themselves, free to be present, in the moment, and enjoy the luxury of time. That is the single biggest lesson I carried into The Safari Golfer: we are not a tour company; we are your host, and the distinction matters.

Let’s talk golf. What makes playing a great course in Africa such a different experience from playing a great course anywhere else in the world?

South Africa has some genuinely world-class golf courses, a number of them designed by some of the best golfers the game has produced. But the design pedigree isn’t actually what sets them apart. It’s the natural environment they sit inside: the birdlife, the scenery, the fact that you can play a round in the morning and be back in time for an evening game drive through Big Five territory. That combination doesn’t exist in many other places on earth. The climate plays its part too. South Africa has some of the best golfing weather anywhere, which means the course is rarely the limiting factor on a trip; the surroundings are the whole point.

For golfers, the idea of combining great courses with safari, wine and some of Africa’s most spectacular landscapes sounds completely awesome. What does your perfect golf trip look like?

It would look exactly like our Signature Journey. When the vision for it first came together, I sat back and asked myself how I would want to do this journey myself, and the Signature Journey was born from that question.

It starts in Cape Town: a private villa, a private chef cooking whatever I feel like on the day, and a private sommelier curating a wine list from my own preferences, drawn from wines specific to wherever I happen to be staying. Add a few of the city’s best restaurants and a night out taking in the people and culture of a truly magnificent city, a round or two of golf for some banter and competition on the course, and then a crisp glass of wine watching the sun set over the Atlantic seaboard while my chef prepares a seafood braai with the catch of the day. (a braai is like a barbecue but better).

From there it’s into the Winelands, to a private manor house, the same chef and sommelier travelling with us, sweeping views over the vineyards, and private tastings with some of the country’s most renowned winemakers. Golf continues alongside the laid-back rhythm of wine country living, on the fairways at Pearl Valley.

Then on to Fancourt, South Africa’s premier golf destination, where the golf itself becomes the focus, and you get a chance to take on the country’s number one golf course, The Links.

From Fancourt we travel privately into the heart of South Africa’s most celebrated game reserve, the Sabi Sands, to a private homestead in the middle of Big Five territory, with enough time built in to properly immerse yourself in what the bush has to offer. Halfway through that stay, we take to the helicopters and fly over the Kruger National Park itself to our final round, at the legendary Leopard Creek. The course sits right alongside the park, and here you don’t go looking for a ball that’s found the water hazard, not when you can’t be sure what else might be sharing it with you. After the round, it’s back into the helicopters, timed perfectly for a curated wine tasting as the sun sets over the African bush.

That’s the lookbook version. But the journey is built to flex around the guest, not the other way around: private vehicles for each couple to explore as and when they want, a schedule that bends rather than dictates. The lookbook is the starting point. What we actually build is whatever version of that trip is right for the person standing in front of us.

You offer both golf-focused Signature Journeys and Wild Journeys. How do you decide which is the right experience for each guest?

Honestly, the guest usually decides for us. Every journey starts with a conversation, not a brochure, and it becomes clear fairly quickly which way someone is leaning. The lookbook journeys are a starting point, not a fixed menu. If golf is central to how someone travels, the Signature Journey, entirely South African and built around golf, is the natural fit. If they want the wilderness without any golf at all, Wild Journeys takes them further, into Botswana, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Tanzania, whether that means gorilla trekking, the delta, or the open plains. There is no right or wrong journey. Clients give us their vision of Africa; we listen, and then we make the recommendations and the logistical calls needed to craft the experience around it, whether that’s the lookbook as it stands, something that sits between the two, or entirely outside them.

You talk a lot about travelling at a relaxed pace. Why do you think slowing down can make such a difference to the African experience?

We see it more and more today, with social media adding real pressure onto fragile ecosystems. Out on safari, it’s obvious: there’s a rush to get the perfect picture to show your followers you were there, before you’ve actually taken in what’s in front of you. Africa rewards those who arrive unhurried; it’s a phrase we hold dear at The Safari Golfer. It’s easy to rush around ticking boxes: this sighting, that golf course, this restaurant. But the natural world unfolds at its own pace, and if you have the patience to wait, to listen to the bush and watch it through your own eyes before you reach for a camera, you see far more of it. At a sighting, stay a little longer than you think you need to, and you’ll often catch the interaction between species that everyone else missed because they’d already moved on.

Golf asks for the same patience: the time it takes to prepare for the next shot, to think through club selection properly, rather than rushing to the next hole. Day-to-day life is getting faster and faster, worrying about tomorrow before today has even begun. It’s why The Safari Golfer does what it does: our goal is to take all the unnecessary stress out of travel, so that you can simply be there, present, and enjoy the luxury of time.

How much of creating the perfect itinerary comes down to knowing the right people and those little details you simply won’t find in a guidebook?

Almost all of it. Anyone can hand a guest a list of courses and camps. What a host offers is different: knowing the break in a green at a course you’ve played every week, the line off a blind tee, the knowledge to wait that extra five minutes at a wildlife sighting because of a particular animal’s reaction or mood, the table at a restaurant that catches the evening light just right, the vintage a winemaker keeps back for the guests who actually ask for it, and the exact moment the light turns right for a sundowner that only works in one specific place. My team and I have stayed in these camps ourselves, and we’ve formed real bonds with the staff there, people we know by name. That is not something you find in a guidebook.

How do you make sure there’s something for the non-golfers, or the golfer who would happily swap their clubs for binoculars for a day?

We build every journey around the people taking it, not around the golf. On the Signature Journey, the safari leg stands entirely on its own, so a non-golfer never feels like they’re waiting around for someone else’s round to finish. And if a guest simply isn’t in the mood to play on a given day, tired or otherwise, there’s no shortage of alternatives. A private vehicle is on standby, and with enough notice, we can arrange almost anything behind the scenes: our chef will trade his clubs for an apron and teach a cooking class instead; there are art galleries worth a morning, a hike up Lion’s Head for anyone who wants the view, wellness treatments arranged in the privacy of your own accommodation, a visit to one of the wine farms we know best, or simply the quiet of your own private residence while everyone else plays on.

Wild Journeys takes the golf clubs out of the equation entirely. If you want some of South Africa without the golf, and then a specific safari destination on top of that, that’s arranged accordingly. It comes back to that initial conversation: what a client tells us there gives us everything we need to tailor the experience around them.

How does The Safari Golfer ensure that the incredible places and communities guests visit benefit from their journeys too?

A portion of every journey goes toward conservation and community projects we consider close to our heart, including the Cape Leopard Trust, which works to protect Cape leopards and predator diversity in the Western Cape, and The Lunchbox Fund, which provides daily, nutritionally fortified meals to food-insecure schoolchildren across South African townships and rural communities. Park fees and conservation levies from the camps and lodges we work with add to this automatically. Should a guest want to get more involved with any of these projects, that’s easily arranged during their time with us, whether that’s a conversation with our partners over dinner or just a quick chat.

Finally, Matt, we’ve got our clubs packed, the safari gear is on, and we’re ready to go. Where are you taking us, and why should it be at the top of every golfer’s travel wish list?

We’re doing the Signature Journey. It has everything we need: the golf, the wine, the food, the people, and of course the safari itself. Most golf trips leave the safari at home, and most safaris leave the clubs behind. This is the one journey that never makes you choose. Pack both bags, because for the first time, you won’t have to decide which one to leave behind.

W: The Safari Golfer
T: +27 82 923 1724