Welcome traveller,

Some businesses begin with a business plan. Ours began with a feeling. A quiet, persistent sense that travel, at its best, is one of life’s most transformative privileges, and that the role of a truly great travel designer is to honour that, in ways the industry had long since forgotten.

We had spent years working behind the scenes of the travel world, in the engine rooms of large-scale international events, in the corporate corridors of one of South Africa’s most prominent investment banks, managing the movement of people across time zones and continents with precision and care. We were good at it. But something was missing. The traveller, it seemed to us, had become an afterthought in their own journey. A booking reference. A seat number. A transaction.
So we asked ourselves a simple question: what would happen if travel felt personal again?

Mr and Mr Jones was our answer. Founded in 2012 and built on the belief that a journey should reflect the soul of the person taking it, we set out to create a different kind of travel design, defined by something quieter and more considered than what had come before. A service that didn’t just move people from place to place, but one that genuinely understood why they were going, what they hoped to find, and how they wanted to feel when they arrived.

What followed was an education unlike any other. We spent over a decade living and working across continents, long before the world had a name for that kind of life, travelling not to collect destinations but to understand them. We watched storms gather and break over the Maasai Mara as the great migration moved across the plains below. We cycled through the ruins of Angkor at dawn as saffron-robed monks chanted in the stillness of the morning. We savoured long, unhurried lunches in tucked-away Lisbon wine bars, wandered the backstreets of Bangkok and Madrid until the cities revealed themselves on their own terms, and traced the echoes of ancient trade routes through towns that history has been slow to leave behind.

We discovered, through all of it, that the world gives its most meaningful gifts quietly. Not in the grandest hotels or the most photographed sunsets, but in the unplanned moment, the unexpected conversation, the view that no itinerary could have predicted. True luxury, we came to understand, is not defined by price or prestige. It is defined by time. By the feeling of being genuinely seen, heard, and cared for. By arriving somewhere and sensing, without quite knowing why, that everything has been thought of.

This philosophy shapes everything we do. Every itinerary we design begins not with a destination but with a conversation, an intuitive, unhurried dialogue about who our clients are, what moves them, and what kind of story they want to tell. From there, we build with care: slow mornings and perfectly timed arrivals, dinners that feel like rare discoveries, accommodations where the welcome feels like coming home. We think ahead so that our clients never have to, and we remain quietly present throughout, available and attentive, whether the journey is unfolding beautifully or, as travel sometimes does, taking an unexpected turn.

Over 80 per cent of our original clients are still with us. We think that says more than any accolade could.

We are proud members of the IGLTA and staunch believers in travel that is inclusive, responsible, and deeply respectful of the places and people it touches. We believe in enriching the communities our clients visit, in moving through the world with curiosity and humility, and in the idea that a journey, undertaken with intention, can leave both the traveller and the world a little better than before.

Cape Town is now our home and our creative base, a city of extraordinary beauty and layered complexity, where cultures converge and the light falls as it does nowhere else on earth. It suits us. It shapes us. And it is from here that we continue to do what we have always done: design journeys that are seamless, personal, and quietly extraordinary, for travellers who understand that the way you see the world says everything about how you choose to live in it.

Today that work takes five forms: the journeys we design for private clients, the lifestyle practice we run for a handful of households, the celebrations we plan in the Cape, the marine desk that looks after visiting yachts and their crews, and the travel we manage for the lodges, camps and creative studios whose people are always somewhere else. Different briefs, one method.

Here’s to the journey ahead and the pursuit of the extraordinary.

Lance and David van den Heever-Liebenberg
Founders, Mr and Mr Jones