Logistics or theatre, and they cost about the same

The test

Ask what the scheduled alternative costs in hours, not in money.

If the honest answer is a hub connection, an overnight in a city, or a morning spent flying against the direction of a circuit, the charter is buying back a day and it is the most defensible expensive thing on a safari invoice.

If the answer is that the scheduled flight leaves ninety minutes later and takes an extra forty in the air, you are buying the experience of a private aircraft. Which is a fine thing to buy; it is simply not a purchase of time.

Where charters genuinely earn it

• Multi-country routes where the scheduled option is a jet via a capital city with an overnight at one end.
• Awkward pairs of airstrips that sit on different circuits, so the scheduled route goes out to a hub and back.
• Arrival days, where a charter from the international airport straight to camp turns a lost day into a game drive.
• Groups of four or more, where the per-head cost converges on scheduled seats anyway.
• Trips with a fixed permit date at one end, where a missed connection has no recovery.

Where they mostly do not

Between two airstrips on the same circuit, for two people, where the scheduled hop is forty minutes. The aircraft is nicer; the day is identical.

A helicopter transfer that replaces a short flight. Helicopters earn their place when the destination has no airstrip, when the flight itself is the excursion, or over terrain where the view is the point — not as a substitute for a functioning scheduled network.

What charters also buy

A baggage allowance that ends the 15kg conversation, which matters to photographers more than to anybody else. Departure times chosen by you rather than by a circuit. And the ability to fly into an airstrip that the scheduled network does not serve, which is occasionally the only way to reach the place you actually want to be.

That last one is a genuine capability rather than a comfort, and it is the reason some remote camps effectively require a charter.

The balloon question

A balloon flight is a lovely thing and it is not a game drive. It launches before dawn, it is expensive, and it costs you the best morning of a three-night stay.

Book it knowingly — as an experience rather than as wildlife viewing — and preferably on a day that was never going to be the best morning anyway. Anybody selling it as the highlight of a photographic trip has mixed up two products.

How we quote it

As a separate line, with the scheduled alternative shown next to it and the time difference stated in hours. That is the only way to see what you are buying, and it is why we will not fold a charter into a headline per-night figure.