Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Exclusive Botswana Safaris exists to answer one question that every Botswana enquiry carries and nobody publishes an answer to: why is this roughly twice the price of a comparable trip in East Africa?

The reasons are structural rather than greedy, and they compound. Botswana has pursued a high-value, low-volume tourism policy for decades, implemented through land allocation rather than through prices directly. Most good safari land is concession, leased to one operator with a cap on how many beds may exist across an enormous area — so a nine-tent camp earns the rent on tens of thousands of acres from eighteen guests. Almost everything, including a great deal of the food, arrives by light aircraft. And concession fees fall due on the lease rather than on occupancy, so the low season is paid for by the people who come in the high one.

Then the page nobody writes: is it worth it? Sometimes plainly yes — when the emptiness is the point, when you want water-based safari that exists nowhere else, on a second trip after East Africa. Sometimes plainly no — on a first safari with a fixed modest budget, when the priority is the most animals in one view, or on a trip too short to absorb the flying.

We are paid a commission calculated on what you book, and a Botswana trip pays us more than a Kenyan one of the same length. That is exactly why the "when it is not worth it" page exists in the form it does; without it the recommendation would be worth nothing. We also hold no photography of Botswana, so the images here are close wildlife subjects and camp interiors from elsewhere in the region rather than pictures implying a place.

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 Botswana guides, each going deeper on one subject than a single site could. This one is Exclusive Botswana Safaris: Expensive by policy, not by accident — and sometimes not worth it. These are the ones that sit closest to it:

• Botswana Safari Collection — Botswana region by region: the Okavango, the Linyanti, Chobe and the Kalahari.
• Okavango Delta Luxury — Water camps and land camps, the flood cycle, and which months suit which kind of stay.
• Okavango Luxury — What the Delta’s best camps actually offer, and what the nightly rate is buying.
• Elite Safari Africa — The very top of the market: private aircraft, whole camps, and what $4,000 a night actually buys.

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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