Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Botswana Safari Collection is an orientation guide to a country that is almost always sold as one place. Botswana is marketed as the Okavango Delta, which is a little like selling Italy as Venice.

There are four distinct safari regions here and the differences between them are larger than the differences between many whole countries. The Delta is water — channels, floodplains and islands, with camps that divide into water camps, land camps and seasonal ones that do both. The Linyanti and Selinda concessions are where the country feels emptiest, and where leases permit night drives and off-road driving that the national parks do not. Chobe has remarkable elephant along its river and is the busiest ground in the country. The Kalahari and the pans run the opposite way round, coming alive in the green season when everything else is quiet.

The fact that reorganises a Botswana plan is that the Delta floods in the dry season — the water falls in the Angolan highlands months earlier and takes that long to arrive. So the best water months coincide with the best game months everywhere else, which is why the peak is so firmly peak and why the shoulder either side is where the value sits.

We should say plainly that we hold no photography of Botswana. The images on these pages are wildlife and camp photographs from elsewhere in the region, chosen to show a subject rather than to imply a place, and we would rather tell you that than let a picture do work a caption would not support.

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 Botswana Safari Collection: Botswana is sold as the Okavango, which is like selling Italy as Venice. These are the ones that sit closest to it:

• Exclusive Botswana Safaris — Why Botswana costs what it does: private concessions, bed levies and a deliberate low-volume model.
• 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.
• Luxury Safari Planner — Planning a luxury safari across East and Southern Africa: what the money actually buys, and how to spend it well.

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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