Built for
independent hospitality owners.
We exist because independent hospitality properties deserve the same calibre of commercial intelligence that global hotel groups take for granted. Our 12-month strategic partnership transforms your commercial performance by aligning technical infrastructure with high-yield, data-led distribution.
We work closely with owners, GMs, CFOs, marketing and revenue teams, providing clarity where complexity often exists. Our role is not to replace your internal team, but to walk alongside you, bringing structure, insight, perspective and results.
Born from expertise.
Built for hospitality.
Secret Source didn’t start in a boardroom. It started in the trenches, running high-performance digital campaigns and realising the hospitality industry deserved something better than cookie-cutter marketing. It deserved a partner who understood both the data and the guest.
Your data is the secret. It’s the advantage already sitting in your PMS and channel manager, unused. And the win isn’t reach, it’s being in front of the right potential traveller at the right point in their booking window. That’s the secret source. Put together, that’s the whole model.
25+ Properties served
Luxury Lodges
Safari & Game Reserves
Winelands Estates
Cape Wine Country
City Hotels
Urban Independents
From luxury winelands estates and safari lodges to boutique city hotels, our model has been tested and proven across 25+ properties, each with unique positioning, rate strategies and guest profiles. We specialise in owner-managed and independent properties where a one-size-fits-all agency approach simply doesn’t cut it.
The SearchKings
Africa connection
Secret Source was born from SearchKings Africa, one of the continent’s leading digital performance agencies. As a Google Premier Partner and Microsoft Elite Partner, SearchKings Africa has built a reputation for delivering measurable commercial results across 300+ clients globally.
Over time, a pattern emerged: hospitality clients needed more than campaign management. They needed a strategic partner who could sit at the intersection of marketing, revenue strategy and operational data – someone who spoke the language of occupancy, ADR and RevPAR, not just impressions and clicks.
SearchKings Africa at a Glance
Africa's most reviewed Performance Agency
SearchKings Africa’s deep expertise in paid search, SEO, GEO, AEO, CRM and conversion optimisation forms the activation backbone of every Secret Source engagement, ensuring our strategies don’t just look good on paper, they deliver in the real world.
The Team
Brett Perlstein
Founder & CEO (SearchKings Africa) | CA(SA)
Brett’s deep-rooted connection to the hospitality and tourism sector began at a young age while touring the length and breadth of the African continent. Seeing firsthand the transformative power of tourism ignited a lifelong passion to drive sustainable growth into the region.
A Chartered Accountant and revenue generation specialist with 15 years of industry experience, Brett is driven by a single-minded goal: to help hospitality businesses thrive, expose more global travellers to our extraordinary continent, and build a stronger local economy through sustainable job creation. By bridging high-level financial strategy with cutting-edge digital growth tactics, Brett helps tourism brands and owners unlock hidden revenue potential and scale with confidence.
Wade Scobbie
Head of Travel & Hospitality (SearchKings Africa)
BBA Marketing & Hospitality Management
Wade has spent his entire career immersed in hospitality and tourism and hasn’t stepped away from the industry for a single day. His journey spans on-the-ground experience across diverse boutique and luxury properties both locally and overseas, alongside dedicated tenure in revenue data analytics and specialised industry recruitment. Armed with a degree in Marketing and Hospitality Management and a decade of SEM expertise, Wade brings a rare 360-degree perspective to client success. He seamlessly marries deep data analytics, complex tech stack integration, and proven marketing strategy to build custom execution roadmaps that drive measurable, long-term growth for Secret Source’s partners.
Our Journey
Two years of testing, proving and refining
The spark:
Working across SearchKings Africa’s diverse client portfolio, we noticed a gap in the hospitality space – properties sitting on goldmines of booking data with no strategic lens to unlock it.
Testing the concept:
We partnered with select lodges and boutique hotels to test our hypothesis, that a more consultative, data-led approach could dramatically outperform traditional agency models in hospitality.
Secret Source is born:
After two years of proving the model across multiple properties, delivering measurable revenue uplifts and deeper commercial clarity, Secret Source launched as a dedicated strategic arm for the hospitality industry.
Marketing firepower,
purpose-built for hospitality
Every Secret Source engagement is powered by the same performance-marketing expertise that earned SearchKings Africa its Premier and Elite partner status. The difference? It’s now channelled exclusively through a hospitality lens.
Precision paid media
High-performance Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns built specifically for hospitality, driving direct bookings, not vanity metrics.
Precision paid media
High-performance Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns built specifically for hospitality, driving direct bookings, not vanity metrics.
Conversion-led strategy
Every campaign is rooted in commercial data. We optimise for revenue, not clicks, ensuring every rand of ad spend works harder.
Full-funnel activation
From awareness through to repeat guest, we build activation strategies that nurture the full guest journey across search, social and direct channels.
Full-funnel activation
From awareness through to repeat guest, we build activation strategies that nurture the full guest journey across search, social and direct channels.
A Strategic Consultant, not a rep
You’ll work with a dedicated hospitality strategist who understands the operational demands and key commercial outcomes of operating a hospitality business, and the technical demands of performance marketing.
Hear it from our clients
Amy Kropman
CEO, Boschendal
Their industry knowledge of booking trends by source market & their status with Google as a Premier Partner made it a no brainer for us.
Tal Aviram
Owner, Camp Canoe
We chose SearchKings Africa because of the quality of work they were doing for other properties and their ability to speak our language.
Xander Labuschagne
GM, Dorp Hotel
If any other GM asked me about SearchKings Africa I would tell them they are results-driven, highly professional digital partners who truly understand hospitality.
Trace van Wijk
Head of Guest Relations, The BIG Luxury Backpackers
If you're not looking for another agency, but a partner who understands marketing & the hospitality industry, these are your guys!