Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Bespoke Safari Collection is a taxonomy rather than a list of hotels. We do not own camps and do not rank other people’s; what we can usefully publish is the six forms a safari night takes — fixed camp, lodge, mobile camp, fly camp, private house and the genuinely unusual — and what each is actually like.

"Collection" normally means a set of properties somebody has an arrangement with, presented as a curation. That would be both dishonest here and not much use to you. The thing that changes a safari is not which beautiful room you pick but which form the night takes: how early you can leave in the morning, how many other guests exist, what happens when you want to stay out after dark, and how much of the trip is spent packing.

Almost everybody chooses on photographs of interiors, which is the variable that matters least. The one that predicts your week is a single number — how many tents — and it always has an answer.

So we set out what each form is, who it suits, what it costs and how it prices, including the two whole-unit forms that are frequently cheaper per head for a party of six and that almost nobody thinks to ask about.

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 Safari Collection: The form a night takes decides more than the decor does. 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.
• Bespoke East Africa — The building blocks — parks, conservancies, concessions — and how they combine into a route.
• Bespoke Safari Planner — The process itself: brief, draft, revision, booking — and what each stage needs from you.
• Bespoke African Safaris — Choosing a country: what each one is genuinely best at, and who each one suits.

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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