Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Bespoke East Africa is about tenure: the five kinds of land an East African safari is built on, what each one legally permits, and why half of what a camp brochure promises is a property of the ground rather than of the camp.

Walking before breakfast, a spotlight after dark, driving off the track to an animal, four vehicles at a sighting instead of forty — none of that is a camp’s to grant. It is set by a statute or written into a lease, and it changes at a boundary you will never see from the vehicle. Two camps four miles apart can be selling completely different holidays at similar prices, and nothing in either brochure says which is which.

So we publish the taxonomy: national park, national reserve, private conservancy, community conservancy and private concession. What each one is, who holds the title, who sets the rules, where the money goes, and the eight permissions that follow. Then a grid you can hold against any itinerary, and six questions worth asking about any camp on it.

The point of understanding this is not to prefer one category. Parks hold the set pieces that no lease can manufacture; leased land holds the mornings people describe afterwards. Knowing which you are buying is what makes a plan legible.

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 East Africa guides, each going deeper on one subject than a single site could. This one is Bespoke East Africa: The camp cannot give you what the lease does not allow. 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 African Safaris — Choosing a country: what each one is genuinely best at, and who each one suits.
• East Africa Bespoke — Trips built around one interest: photography, birding, walking, riding or conservation.
• Bespoke Safari Journeys — Multi-country journeys: the flights, the borders and the logistics that decide what is possible.

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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