Meet Allen, Our Guest Happiness and Reservations Specialist

Wanna know who is arranging Gorilla Highlands bookings these days, and taking care of clients?

I’m Allen Arinda and I grew up in Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda, so I am a mingle of East Africa! As you can see from the photo I’m an elderly person, all of 20 years old, and I study in Kigali.

I chose Tourism and Hospitality as my academic focus because of my fondness for travel and socialising with new people. My first passion had been fine art but when I found little support for this career from my family (probably they thought that one artist, my brother Kagabo, is enough?) I chose the travel industry.

I find it interesting that the most significant contribution of this business is the immediate creation of new jobs, or in my case, internships. In May, my class had to find a placement for three weeks. My classmates all went to the same company but I didn’t want to join the flock. I found an Indian-owned business in downtown Kigali and had a pretty cool experience. Still, my main benefit was getting to know Vipul Vyas.

Vipul has a nice vegetarian restaurant where I enjoyed my lunches during the internship. One day he asked me what I studied and he was thrilled to share with me the contacts of Miha Logar! To tell you the truth, I was keen on meeting Mr. Miha and learning how he operates Gorilla Highlands, his responsible tourism company, but I didn’t get in touch just yet.

In August, I sent Miha a casual WhatsApp message. Though it was close to midnight, thankfully he took me seriously. The number of inquiries he was managing was getting out of hand and he felt a need to scale up after the lost pandemic years. This is the awesome part; I had delayed a bit in communicating with him but still I had showed up at the perfect time!

In September, I finally met him face to face, spent two weeks in Musanze training and then also met the team in Rwanda and Uganda (the photo above is from Edirisa on Lake Bunyonyi). Now I help from home, for 1-2 hours a day, as I still need to study and feed my brother. I can’t describe how excited I am to get practical experience like this, putting into perspective all the reading and lectures overcrowding my mind! Miha even says I will be the trainer of other interns as the company grows!

A story to be continued for sure … ?