About Bespoke Safari Planner: How We Work

What this site is

Bespoke Safari Planner is about the moment after the itinerary arrives. Nine questions that separate a considered plan from a template, a glossary of phrases that mean less than they sound, and a method for comparing quotes written to be incomparable.

Almost every safari buyer reaches the same point: a PDF has arrived, it is beautiful, it contains a list of camp names and a large number at the bottom, and there is no way from the outside to tell whether it is any good. Every other guide helps you decide what to ask for. This one picks up two weeks later.

The method is published in full, and it works on any itinerary from anybody — including ours. That is deliberate. A good plan can answer all nine questions and a template cannot, which means you do not have to take anybody’s word for it, ours included.

We will read one for you if you send it, and the answer is frequently that it is decent work with two questions attached, and that the right move is to put those questions to whoever wrote it. We would rather be useful and lose the booking than manufacture a problem with somebody else’s plan.

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.

How we are paid

If you book a trip through an enquiry that started here, Nomad Africa pays us a commission. You pay no more than you would going to them directly — camps hold rate parity, so the commission comes out of the agency’s margin, not your price.

That is the whole commercial model. We think you should know it before you read anything else on the site.

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 Planner: How to audit the itinerary somebody has sent you. 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 Journeys — Multi-country journeys: the flights, the borders and the logistics that decide what is possible.
Bespoke Safari Collection — The camps, houses and private concessions a bespoke trip is actually assembled from.

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.

Get an itinerary and quote

Who we are, and how we are paid