Growing up poor in a small rural village in the Eastern Cape, Tuletu Kobo fixated on the dream of one day owning her own hotel. She can’t quite pinpoint what sparked it, perhaps it was the afternoons spent in the family-run businesses of her more privileged friends, or the special linen that her mother took out whenever guest visited their humble home. Whatever the source, the dream remained a burning desire early on and never stopped.
Like many of her generation, Tuletu became a teacher as a way out of poverty. She taught home economics, the closest subject to hospitality, spending nearly three decades in the classroom. But her dream never faded. Alongside her teaching career, she ran countless side-hustles for extra income, each one a stepping stone towards moving closer to her dream.
Today, Tuletu is a testament to what it means playing the long game in business. She is the proud owner of a chain of six guest houses in East London, all painted in the signature bright yellow of her Thule Guest House brand, offering a total of 50 rooms to guests from near and far.
Her journey began with a commitment to educate herself as much as she could about the tourism industry, despite having limited resources. While still working as a teacher, she explored a variety of side-hustles, selling food, second-hand clothes and braiding hair. Each venture taught her valuable lessons about trade, customer service and financial management. But more importantly, each revealed where her true passion lay. “I never enjoyed teaching,” Tuletu admits. “The only time I felt joy was when I was doing business.”
Knowing that a hotel would not be feasible in the rural areas where she lived, Tuletu set her sights on East London. There she secured a job teaching tourism at a local college and set about finding a property that she could convert, one room at a time, into a guest house.
In 2018 she took a bold step toward her dream by purchasing a semi-detached house. She began modestly, marketing her guest rooms to her network in the rural communities where she taught. The cultural habits were changing, more and more people visiting rural areas preferred renting accommodation rather than staying with relatives in the townships. Tuletu tapped into this cultural change and found herself often sleeping in her lounge as she rented out all three of the rooms in her house.Her breakthrough came when the legal practice in the semi-detached house next door agreed to a private sale of their property. Tuletu seized the opportunity and paid it off within a couple of years. Soon after, she acquired another house across the road, also on a private sale. When she had about ten rooms under her belt, she made the courageous decision to resign from teaching and focus on growing her business full-time, a scary and exciting decision to make, she says.
Tuletu expanded her business until she had four guest houses situated close to the tourist attractions of the city of East London catering to the affordable end of the market. Then in 2020, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tuletu made a big leap into the higher-end tourism space. A beautiful 5-roomed house that she had long admired went up for sale. An acquaintance referred her to Business Partners Limited, and with a solid track record behind her, she managed to secure finance for her fifth property and expand her brand even further.
Just six months after acquiring her fifth property, she came across another opportunity, a similar house, but with fourteen rooms. It took some convincing, but again Business Partners Limited agreed to finance the purchase, which became Tuletu’s flagship guest house.
Today, Tuletu finds that her guest houses serve almost the full spectrum of tourists coming to East London. She has rooms for those who like to be close to the city’s buzz, through to luxury rooms for those who prefer tranquil, peaceful and quieter spaces; her portfolio has it all. She has even expanded beyond the Thule Guest House brand, operating a set of dormitory style accommodation with sixty beds for school groups and sport teams stay.
Looking ahead, Tuletu says she is thinking of adding one more guest house to her chain, with the goal of having all her guest houses paid off by the time she turns sixty. Already she can look back on the proud achievement of building the equivalent of a hotel, piece by piece – proving that with vision, grit and resourcefulness, ordinary South Africans can build thriving tourism businesses, even if they have very few resources to start with.
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