Kenya was crowned ‘Africa’s Leading Destination’ in the World Travel Awards 2023 edition, while Nairobi City was named Africa’s Leading Business Travel Destination 2023. In 2024 Kenyan hotels and companies had the highest wins in all the 71 categorises of assessment, accounting for about 25% of all the top slots.  Although Kenya receives about half a million American tourists a year, Briony Chisholm writing for African Destination Features wrote ‘Kenya has always played host to a range of A-listers and it’s not hard to see why.’ And Karen Hastings, the Aussie travel writer and author of  hotel profiles on more than 300 luxury resorts and game lodges in Africa, Central America, and the Caribbean, has  written in her analysis of 16 Top-Rated Tourist Attractions in Kenya, helped to explain that the name Kenya ‘is almost synonymous with the word “safari ” and that few ‘other places on the planet conjure such a spirit of adventure and romance’

The early A- listers included Winston Churchill in 1907, considered the greatest prime minister in British history. Churchill described the Kenya railways at that time as ‘one of the most romantic and most wonderful railways in the world’ whose whistling had the effect of  ‘startling the tribes out of their primordial nakedness’ He was followed in 1909 by Theodore Roosevelt, the 26^th president of the United States who was funded by  Andrew Carnegie and sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.Roosevelt’s safari would include 250 porters and guides. Twenty-two years later he would be followed by Ernest Hemingway, America’s first celebrity writer and later Nobel Prize laureate who had been inspired by Roosevelt’s trip two decades earlier.  Hemingway’s 3 months safari led to his writing the novel Green Hills of Africa.  And in 1952 Kenya would see the visit of Princess Elizabeth who went to bed in Kenya a princess and woke up a queen after her father had died that night.

In more recent times Kenya has hosted the following A-listers amongst others: Prince William of Britain; former US First Lady Jill Biden; US First Lady Melania Trump; former US first lady Hilary Clinton; former US President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama; Bill Gates; American RnB singer Keri Hilson, Actress and Super Model Naomi Campbell. Singer Rita Ora; TV host Ellen Degeneres and wife actress Portia de Rossi; American vlogger Kelvin Peña known by his nickname Brother Nature and CNN journalist Richard Quest. Kenya’s hospitality and tourism attractions have therefore been tried and tested by the best of the best.

Contact us to plan that once or many times in a lifetime bespoke holiday. We can also arrange your meetings with prominent people in government, business; wildlife; NGO’s and civil society depending on your interests as part of your experience.

Contact us at: travel@africa-myamericanstory.com