About Private Safari Collection: How We Work

What this site is

Private Safari Collection is about exclusive use as a purchase decision: the four ways to take the whole thing, where each one crosses over on cost, and the specific problems it solves.

Almost every party of six or more prices a safari as six rooms at a nightly rate each, and almost none of them prices the alternative. Exclusive use is sold as a unit rather than per person, so the cost per head falls as the party grows — it is the only upgrade in African travel that routinely gets cheaper the more of you there are, and the crossover sits somewhere most people never bother to calculate.

We also publish the least-known of the four options. A whole-camp buyout at six to ten tents is a reachable number for a large family or a group of friends, and it is rarely offered unprompted because camps quote rooms unless somebody asks for the whole thing.

And we say what it does not buy. It does not improve the land, it does not guarantee a dedicated guide unless you ask, it does not make a leopard more likely, and below about six people it usually costs more rather than less. The things it does buy — the timetable belonging to your party, every day, with no negotiation — are good enough not to need embellishing.

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 Private Safari Collection: Exclusive use prices as a unit, which changes the arithmetic entirely. 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 Safari Collection — The camps, houses and private concessions a bespoke trip is actually assembled from.
Elite Safari Africa — The very top of the market: private aircraft, whole camps, and what $4,000 a night actually buys.
Luxury Safari Planner — Planning a luxury safari across East and Southern Africa: what the money actually buys, and how to spend it well.

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.

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Who we are, and how we are paid