Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Custom Safari Africa is about the levers. Everyone in this industry says tailor-made; almost nobody says which parts are actually adjustable, so most people change the obvious things and accept the rest as though it were physics.

A great deal of it is not physics. The vehicle, the departure time, the guide, the route inside a day, how long you stay at a sighting, where and when you eat, which seat you take — all changeable on request, and eight of them cost nothing at all. They do not appear on a quote because they are not products, which is precisely why nobody mentions them.

So we publish the list, honestly labelled: free, worth paying for, rarely worth it, and fixed. The last category matters as much as the first. Gate times, permit dates, where the migration is on your dates, the weather and whether you see a leopard do not move for anybody, and a planner who implies otherwise is telling you something about how the rest of the trip will be handled.

The useful phrasing, throughout, is to describe the day you want rather than the product you think delivers it. One sentence about the day selects the land, the camp size and the vehicle arrangement at once.

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.

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 Custom Safari Africa: Most of it is adjustable, and several of the levers are free. 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 Planner — The process itself: brief, draft, revision, booking — and what each stage needs from you.
• Bespoke Safari Collection — The camps, houses and private concessions a bespoke trip is actually assembled from.
• 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.

Get an itinerary and quote