Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Elite Safari Africa examines the top of this market rather than admiring it. The question it answers is one nobody in the industry publishes: what does the next thousand dollars a night actually add, and at what point does it stop adding anything that affects the safari?

The honest answer is that almost all the wildlife advantages — land that permits off-road driving and night drives, a private vehicle, excellent guiding, three nights per camp rather than two — are in hand by about $1,800 a night. Everything above that buys time, control, hospitality and continuity. All four are real and worth money to somebody. None of them is the same purchase as better game viewing, and conflating them is how people spend a great deal on a trip that a cheaper version would have beaten.

So there is a page on where the curve flattens, one on what the top band genuinely buys, one distinguishing private aviation that recovers a day from private aviation that flies the scheduled route slightly earlier, and one on the two things at the very top with no cheaper substitute — genuine remoteness at scale, and a guide of the first rank for the whole trip.

We are paid a commission on what you book, so a larger booking pays us more. That is exactly why this site says where a budget stops paying, and why we would rather tell you the number you have in mind is higher than the trip needs.

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 Elite Safari Africa: What each thousand dollars a night actually adds, and where it stops. These are the ones that sit closest to it:

• Luxury Safari Planner — Planning a luxury safari across East and Southern Africa: what the money actually buys, and how to spend it well.
• Private Safari Collection — Exclusive-use houses, whole-camp buyouts and private mobile camps — and when they are worth it.
• The Bespoke Safari — What bespoke actually means in safari planning — and, more usefully, what it does not.
• East African Luxury — Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda at the top end, and how the four genuinely differ.

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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