Coffeebeans Routes
Events Organisers in Cape Town

Coffeebeans Routes founder and Director Iain Harris talks about the origins of the business around Culture in the New Economy.
We are interested in contemporary, urban Africa, and the incredible depth of opportunity they offer.
Coffeebeans Routes creates travel experiences around the stories of Cape Town.
Through a dedicated service provider, we also specialise in music services to the travel, conference and eventing sectors.

We create travel experiences around South African stories. We offer scheduled day tours, private day tours, tailor made programmes, multi-day programmes, and special events. As long as there are people and stories, we have a canvas. Please see our Cape Town and Johannesburg Tour sections for more on our activities. We specialise in long and short form creative and cultural programmes. We also produce events and special projects, sometimes our own, sometimes for clients. Michael handles everything to do with being on the road, managing content, and maintaining good relationships with our hosts and suppliers. He also handles the customised and large group programmes. Everywhere in the world, across all languages and creeds and borders, everybody understands coffee. The work that we do as Coffeebeans Routes is to facilitate communion across borders that are both real and imagined. We create cultural interventions for economic growth. A great place for us is one where the stories of that place are everywhere. Where local food is easier to find than food from elsewhere. We build experiences around stories because everybody has them, and because, in a city packaged on binary assumptions about people, culture, language and economics, when we are lead by stories, we cut through to the pulse of what is happening. We believe that responsible tourism is about the attempt to answer the questions of how we make the world better. In our case the primary question is: can tourism shift the dominant economic and social narrative, and position the least economically empowered at the heart of the mainstream? So the starting point for us is social justice, and our biggest impact is through a responsible approach to how we engage with people, communities and stories, and how positioning new narratives at the heart of tourism starts to level imbalances. Our approach to sustainable and responsible tourism practice, therefore, is to focus on social justice, while in parallel implementing tangible environmental management systems where feasible. At our HQ w e recycle almost everything, including organic waste, and send approximately 5% of our waste to the landfill. By establishing ourselves as an off-grid model of best practice, we can influence the suppliers we work with. Work to place these narratives in the mainstream of the tourism industry. Implement environmentally sustainable interventions at every possible level of our business\. Favour accommodation establishments that show a commitment to clear, effective sustainability strategies. Pursue in the stories told and the experiences created opportunities to challenge binary notions of culture and people and place.