Luxury African Safaris

Every safari on this page has been designed, costed and, in most cases, travelled. The properties named on each itinerary are the properties the price is built on — not a category, not a “4-star equivalent”, but Chitabe and Vumbura Plains and Gomoti Plains by name. That is the difference between a quote you can interrogate and a brochure number.

They are worked examples rather than products. Nobody buys the Okavango Delta Immersion exactly as written. What people do is read three or four of these, work out which shape appeals — a single deep region, or two contrasting ones, or safari followed by an island — and start from there. The itinerary you eventually travel will share a skeleton with something on this page and very little else.

Four things, in roughly this order. The camps: a private concession in Botswana where you are one of twelve guests across 200,000 acres is a different economy from a lodge on the edge of a national park with shared game drives. The season: the same camp can double between the green season and the peak of the dry. The transfers: light aircraft between Delta camps is normal and priced in; helicopter transfers into the Serengeti are a choice. The length: seven nights and twelve nights are different trips, not the same trip at different scales, because the third region only becomes worth adding past about ten.

The published range here runs from just under $10,000 to just over $80,000 per person, with most between $20,000 and $32,000. Those figures assume two adults sharing. A family of four, or a party travelling in a single vehicle with a private guide, changes the arithmetic in both directions.

Botswana is the quiet one. The Okavango Delta and the Linyanti are largely private concessions, which means low vehicle density, night drives and walking where the parks do not allow them, and a sense of having the place to yourself that is difficult to buy elsewhere. It is also the most expensive per night, for exactly those reasons.

Tanzania and Kenya are where the Great Migration is, and where the density of animals is highest. The northern Serengeti and the Masai Mara from July to October carry the river crossings; the southern Serengeti from late January to March carries the calving. Both countries also reward the traveller who leaves the famous parks — Mwiba, Grumeti, Lewa, Naboisho — for conservancies with a fraction of the traffic.

Rwanda and Uganda are not safaris in the plains sense. They are one or two extraordinary hours with a habituated gorilla family, wrapped in a few days of forest and volcanoes. They combine well with Kenya or Tanzania and badly with a tight schedule.

South Africa and Namibia are the two that work for people who want something besides wildlife in the same trip: Cape Town and the winelands at one end, or the dunes at Sossusvlei and the Skeleton Coast, which is a landscape safari with animals in it rather than the other way round. Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique and the Seychelles mostly appear as the second half — Victoria Falls, walking safaris in South Luangwa, or an island to stop moving on.