Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

East Africa Bespoke is about trips built around one interest rather than around general game viewing. Photography, birding, walking, riding and conservation are five genuinely different holidays that happen to use the same landscapes.

Most disappointed special-interest travellers did not choose the wrong country. They booked a general safari and assumed the interest would fit inside it — and it does not, because the interest dictates the land, the vehicle and the guide long before it dictates the destination. A photographic trip starts by choosing land that permits off-road driving; a birding trip starts by booking a guide; a walking trip starts by ruling out most national parks.

So each of these has its own page, with what it requires, what it costs as a separate line, and the specific way it goes wrong. We also publish the awkward ones: that a riding safari needs you to genuinely ride, and that a conservation visit arranged for visitors is not the same as watching work that would happen anyway.

We are a planning guide rather than a conservation organisation, and we will not vouch for programmes we are not in a position to audit. Where a project publishes its own reporting, we would rather point you at it than characterise it for you.

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 East Africa Bespoke: A photographic trip and a birding trip are not the same holiday. 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.
• Custom Safari Africa — What genuinely changes when you customise a safari, what does not, and where the money goes.

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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