About
Who we are, and how we are paid
Both worth knowing before you take planning advice from anyone, including The Bespoke Safari.
What this site is
The Bespoke Safari exists to defend a word the industry has worn smooth. A bespoke route is derived from a brief; a configured one is a standard circuit with substitutions. We write about the difference, including the cases where the standard circuit is the better answer.
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 The Bespoke Safari: Derived from a brief, not picked off a shelf. These are the ones that sit closest to it:
- Luxury Safari Planner — Planning a luxury safari across East and Southern Africa: what the money actually buys, and how to spend it well.
- Bespoke Safari Planner — The process itself: brief, draft, revision, booking — and what each stage needs from you.
- Bespoke African Safaris — Choosing a country: what each one is genuinely best at, and who each one suits.
- Bespoke East Africa — The building blocks — parks, conservancies, concessions — and how they combine into a route.
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.
More from our Africa guides
Our other Africa guides
Each of these is a focused guide we publish. Same Africa specialist behind every enquiry.
Ready to turn this into a real itinerary?
Send us your dates, who is travelling and roughly what you want to spend per person per night. Our Africa specialist comes back within 24 hours with a plan built around them and a costed quote.