Scott's story.

My grandfather, John Edkins, farmed Ascot outside Bulawayo, on the red earth of Matabeleland, and it was there, walking every acre through the school holidays among acacias, termite mounds and the scent of first rain on dry ground, that Africa first made a quiet kind of sense to me.

When my parents, Barry and Lesley Edkins, settled in Bergvliet, they carried the name to Cape Town, where Ascot Gardens grew into a sixteen-room guest house around my mother’s celebrated garden: a house in which guests were looked after properly and nothing was ever done by half.

In 1996 I founded Ascot Tours from a single Cape Town office, with one simple ambition: to bring golf and the African bush together more gracefully than anyone else. Thirty years on, it works from five offices across the continent and was named Africa’s Best Golf Tour Operator at the World Golf Awards in 2016, 2017, 2021 and 2024.

Ascot Private is the newest chapter, born of a lifelong love of aircraft and an intimate knowledge of the airstrips of Southern and East Africa, so that the aircraft is yours from the moment you land, and you share neither vehicle, table nor timetable with anyone you did not bring.

We host no more than twenty-four parties a year, from a collection of thirty journeys, because I read every itinerary before it reaches you and speak with every party before they fly, whether you depart from Cape Town or arrive from New York or Dubai. It is a promise that can be kept twenty-four times a year, and not two hundred.

Part of every journey supports Golfing for Change, our community project in Oupad, Knysna, where it pays for hot meals twice a week and school uniforms for children I know by name, and for mentors at an early childhood centre in Sweetwaters.