Nine questions, and a good plan has answers to all of them

1. What land is each camp on?

Park, reserve, private conservancy, community conservancy or concession. It decides whether you may walk, drive after dark, go off-road to an animal, and how many other vehicles may reach a sighting.

Then the follow-up, which is the one that catches people: where do the game drives actually go? A camp on private land that drives into the public park each morning has given you a private bed and a public day.

2. How many nights in each place?

Two nights is one full day, because the arrival afternoon and departure morning are both eaten by the move. Three nights is two full days, and the second and third mornings are when a guide stops finding animals and starts showing you a place.

An itinerary with three two-night stays is an itinerary about moving.

3. How many moves, and what kind?

Count the internal flights and the road transfers. An airstrip-to-airstrip hop costs half a day; a border crossing by air costs most of one; a road crossing costs a full day and a change of vehicle.

This is the number that most often explains why a fourteen-night trip contains eight good days.

4. Private vehicle or shared?

One line, and it changes every day of the trip: when you leave, when you come back, how long you stay at a sighting, whether you can follow something, and whether the person beside you wants to go back for lunch.

It is frequently unstated in a summary and frequently the largest single difference between two quotes.

5. Are fees included, and for how many days?

Park entry, conservancy fees and permits are charged per person per day, and on well-known areas they are a three-figure sum. Whether they sit inside the headline rate or underneath it changes a total substantially.

Ask for them itemised. A quote that separates them is easier to compare and much harder to pad.

6. What is actually in the rate?

"Full board" and "all inclusive" are different, and neither covers everything. Premium drinks, some activities, laundry, park fees and tips sit on various sides of the line depending on the camp.

The useful version of this question is: what will we be asked to pay for while we are there?

7. What are the payment and cancellation terms?

Deposit, balance date, what happens if you move the dates rather than cancel, and whether any of it is insurable. Camps have their own terms and an operator passes them through, so the answer can vary within one itinerary.

Read it before the deposit, not after.

8. Who operates it on the ground?

A named operator who holds the whole trip and rebuilds the day when a leg fails, or a set of separately booked components where a missed connection is your problem.

This is invisible until something goes wrong, at which point it is the only thing that matters.

9. Why these camps?

The answer should be about you — your dates, what you said you wanted to do, who is travelling, what you have done before. If the answer is about the camps, in the language of the camps’ own websites, it is a template.

This is the only one of the nine that cannot be answered by a spreadsheet, which is why it is the most revealing.

What to do with the answers

Put them to whoever sent the plan. Most will answer everything without friction, and the plan will improve. That is a good outcome and it does not require changing who you book with.

If the answers do not come, that is also information, and it arrived before the deposit rather than after it.