Creators Reveal How South Africa's Best-Kept Secrets Made It to BBC Lifestyle

Trevor Kaplan and Nico Nel had a simple starting question for their influencers: where do you actually love to go? The answers shaped Hidden Gems: South Africa, a new interactive series on BBC Lifestyle that hands viewers something rare in travel television — a genuine vote on which destination deserves the title of the country’s ultimate hidden gem.

The format breaks from conventional travel programming in two concrete ways. Rather than hiring established presenters, Kaplan and Nel of PD Production deliberately chose growing social media influencers, people with authentic voices and real followings rather than celebrity polish. These influencers pack their own bags, travel to each location themselves, and communicate what makes a place worth visiting through lived experience. No scripted narration. No paid placements. Nobody is paying to appear on the show, which the producers see as central to its credibility.

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The second differentiator is the voting mechanism itself. Viewers don’t watch passively; they participate weekly, with rewards and a grand prize sustaining engagement across the season. It’s a structure built for the way most of the show’s audience already consumes content, on mobile platforms, mid-conversation, across multiple channels at once.

What surprised Kaplan and Nel most during production was scale. South Africa has far more hidden gems than they anticipated, and many of them are affordable. That discovery quietly challenges a common assumption: that worthwhile travel requires serious money. The final list of ten destinations is organized around themes, Water, Mountain, Urban, Eco among them, ensuring variety in landscape, accommodation, and dining rather than a parade of interchangeable luxury lodges.

Defining a hidden gem, it turns out, is harder than spotting a beautiful property. For the producers, the test is the Monday morning story. What do you tell people when you’re back at work? A genuine gem delivers that narrative, whether the journey takes travelers four hours into the Klein Karoo or into an urban landscape closer to home.

Meanwhile, the show’s timing is deliberate. In a difficult economic climate, knowing exactly what you’re booking before you spend matters more than it once did. Honest, curated content from voices viewers already trust addresses that anxiety directly. The series also carries an explicit local-tourism argument: post-COVID, supporting smaller and lesser-known businesses has real stakes for the communities built around them.

Kaplan and Nel’s broader creative philosophy insists that modern travel storytelling belongs to local people telling their own stories. The series features destinations with deep, undiscovered histories, including rock art thousands of years old, framing South Africa not as a backdrop but as the subject. The producers built their previous collaborations with BBC Lifestyle around luxury and uniqueness; here, they’ve added a democratic layer, letting the audience decide what luxury actually means to them.

The full creative vision behind the series is detailed at glamour.co.za/lifestyle/an-exclusive-look-into-bbc-lifestyles-hidden-gems-south-africa-ahead-of-the-season-finale-through-the-eyes-of-its-creators-trevor-kaplan-and-nico-nel-0e82f5a1-1682-4777-a47d-a24ca9b1d7e6.

The season finale will settle the central question the show has been building toward all along: which destination, chosen by viewers rather than producers, earns the title of South Africa’s ultimate hidden gem.