Above the curve
Four purchases, and only one of them is about wildlife
All four are worth money to somebody. Knowing which one you are buying is the difference between an extravagant trip and a wasteful one.
Time
The most defensible luxury purchase in African travel. Private charters on your own schedule remove the half-days that scheduled circuits cost: the hub connection, the city overnight, the morning spent flying against the direction of a circuit.
On a two-week multi-country trip that can be two or three usable days recovered. A day of your holiday is worth what a day of your holiday is worth, and for a lot of people that is a straightforward calculation.
It is also the purchase most often made when it buys nothing — see the aviation page.
Control
Exclusive use: a house, a whole camp, a private mobile camp. The timetable belongs to your party rather than to an operation, which solves a specific class of problem — three generations with three body clocks, small children, mixed interests, a milestone — that no amount of upgrading solves.
For a party of eight or more it is frequently the cheaper answer too, because it prices as a unit.
Hospitality
Food that would hold its own in a city, a cellar worth the name, a spa, interiors by somebody with a reputation, a staff ratio of three to one.
Genuinely lovely and entirely unrelated to the wildlife. We are not sniffy about it — a fortnight is a long time and the hours between drives are most of it — but it should be bought knowingly rather than in the belief that it comes with better game viewing.
Continuity
A private guide who travels with you from camp to camp rather than being handed over at each airstrip. This is the one that straddles the line: it is a hospitality purchase in form and it genuinely improves the safari.
By day four a travelling guide knows what you photograph, what bores you, which of you wants to get out of the vehicle and which does not. A camp guide meeting you on day one of a three-night stay has two mornings to work that out, three times over.
The order to buy them in
| Purchase | Worth it when | Skip it when |
|---|---|---|
| Continuity — a travelling guide | Trips of ten nights or more; photographers; mixed parties | Short trips, where a camp guide has the same information |
| Control — exclusive use | Six or more people; three generations; a milestone | Two or four people who enjoy other guests |
| Time — private charters | Multi-country routes; where a day is genuinely recovered | Where the scheduled alternative costs under two hours |
| Hospitality | Long trips; where the hours between drives matter to you | Short, wildlife-led trips where you are barely in camp |
What none of them buys
A leopard. Nobody can guarantee an animal, and the top band shifts those odds no further than land, vehicle, guide and mornings already did.
Any site implying otherwise is selling, and at these prices the implication is usually made with photographs rather than with sentences.
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