Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Bespoke African Safaris is organised by traveller rather than by destination. Every other comparison lists what each country offers and leaves the matching to you; this one starts with who is going and works back to where — which is also how a specialist actually reasons.

The inversion is the whole product. A page about Botswana cannot tell you whether Botswana is right for a second safari, for somebody who will not fly in a light aircraft, or for a fourteen-year-old who is bored by six hours in a car. Those are questions about you, and they have different answers.

So the site is built as nine kinds of traveller: first trip, second trip, eight days or fewer, the photographer, the walker, the nervous flyer, the family with teenagers, the fixed modest budget, and the person who has been a dozen times. Each entry names a country and gives the reasoning rather than a score, because the reasoning is the part you can argue with.

We say plainly where we would send most people first, and we say it knowing that every country here reaches us through the same partnership on the same terms. There is nothing for us in steering you.

We are not a safari operator. We do not own camps and we do not drive the vehicles.

Who arranges the safaris

When you send an enquiry it goes to Nomad Africa, our partner travel agency in Kenya. They build your itinerary, price it, hold the bookings, take the payments and look after you on the ground from the airport pickup to the flight home.

They plan and operate directly in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana and Zanzibar, which is the whole of what we publish guides to. Where we do not have that depth, we say so rather than taking the enquiry.

It is one partnership, not a marketplace. We do not put your enquiry out to a panel of operators and we do not pass your details to anyone else.

The rules we write to

• No invented reviews. If you see a testimonial here, a real person wrote it and gave us permission to publish it with their name.
• No invented statistics or credentials. We do not claim licences, memberships, awards or numbers we cannot document.
• No promises about animals. Nobody can guarantee a river crossing or a leopard, and any site that implies otherwise is selling.
• Ranges, not fake precision. Where we publish costs they are clearly marked as indicative planning ranges. Your quote is the exact number.
• We say when something will not work. If your budget does not reach what you are picturing, or your dates are wrong for what you want to see, that goes in the first reply.

Part of a network

We publish a family of specialist Africa guides, each going deeper on one subject than a single site could. This one is Bespoke African Safaris: The country follows from the traveller, not the other way round. These are the ones that sit closest to it:

• The Bespoke Safari — What bespoke actually means in safari planning — and, more usefully, what it does not.
• Luxury Safari Planner — Planning a luxury safari across East and Southern Africa: what the money actually buys, and how to spend it well.
• Bespoke East Africa — The building blocks — parks, conservancies, concessions — and how they combine into a route.
• East Africa Bespoke — Trips built around one interest: photography, birding, walking, riding or conservation.

They share this partnership and this editorial standard, and they link to each other wherever a question genuinely belongs on one of the others rather than here.

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