Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Bespoke Safari Journeys is about the joins. Which light aircraft circuits exist, which border crossings are quick and which are not, what a move costs in days, and how those constraints decide whether a multi-country wish list is actually a trip.

Everyone plans a safari by choosing places. What determines whether those places can be strung together is the connective tissue — circuits that run in one direction and not every day, a 15kg soft-bag rule that is genuinely enforced, a crossing that takes an hour and another that takes two days, and the arithmetic that turns ten nights in three countries into seven usable ones.

It is the least glamorous part of planning and the most decisive. Two itineraries with the same camps and different joins are not the same holiday: one contains eleven good days and the other eight, and the difference is invisible on a map.

So we publish how the flying actually works, which borders repay the crossing, seven combinations that hold together with the shortest length each needs, and three popular pairings that do not. Including the answer people do not want, which is that the route does not fit the days they have — and what to do instead.

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 Bespoke Safari Journeys: Whether a route works is decided by the flights between it. 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 African Safaris — Choosing a country: what each one is genuinely best at, and who each one suits.
• Bespoke Safari Planner — The process itself: brief, draft, revision, booking — and what each stage needs from you.

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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