Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Okavango Luxury goes inside the camp. What a Delta rate actually includes, what each activity is genuinely like, what the rhythm of a day is, and what differs between two camps costing the same.

The observation that shapes the site is that Okavango rates are unusually flat. A great many Delta camps sit inside a fairly narrow band, because they face similar costs, a lease, very few beds, and a supply chain that runs by aircraft. So the headline figure separates them far less than it does elsewhere, and a traveller choosing between them on price is using the least informative number available.

What does separate them is six things: whether the camp is on a concession or in the reserve, what the water will be doing on your dates, how many tents there are, whether the vehicle or boat is private, whether a guide is assigned to you for the stay, and where the activities actually happen, because a camp on private land can still drive into the neighbouring reserve every morning, which returns the day to statutory rules however the bed was booked. None of those six appears in a photograph and all six have one-sentence answers.

We describe the activities without the brochure gloss, including saying that a mokoro is not a big-game activity. It is the thing most people remember about the Delta, and it is not how you will see lion. 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 the Okavango guides, each going deeper on one subject than a single site could. This one is Okavango Luxury: Delta rates are unusually flat, so price is the variable that discriminates least. These are the ones that sit closest to it:

• Okavango Delta Luxury. Water camps and land camps, the flood cycle, and which months suit which kind of stay.
• Botswana Safari Collection. Botswana region by region: the Okavango, the Linyanti, Chobe and the Kalahari.
• Exclusive Botswana Safaris. Why Botswana costs what it does: private concessions, bed levies and a deliberate low-volume model.
• Bespoke Safari Collection. The camps, houses and private concessions a bespoke trip is actually assembled from.

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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