Amboseli safaris
Authentic off-the-beaten-track safaris
Amboseli Safaris
Tailormade For You
Kilimanjaro
Amboseli is the main location for those scenes of wildlife set against a backdrop of the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro, perhaps the single most iconic vision of safari Africa.
Elephants
The area is renowned for its elephants, particularly males with enormous tusks, which are most reliably seen during the Jun-Nov dry season
Maasai people
This is the land of the Maasai, many of whom still wear their tribal costumes and live in traditional thatched huts. Meeting these people is a real privilege.
3 to 5 nights
For shorter trips, it is more than possible to fly into Nairobi and connect out to the Amboseli for as few as 3 to 5 nights, something that we occasionally do for guests who are visiting the capital on business. However, it is much more common to visit Maasai Mara on this kind of shorter safari.
7 to 14 nights
Most of our guests tend to deploy 7 to 14 nights on safari in Kenya. At the shorter end, it can be best to focus on one area, perhaps combining a couple of camps in the Maasai Mara. At the longer end, it is possible to also include diverse safari areas including Amboseli, Samburu, Laikipia and Mathew’s Range.
15 to 28 nights
For longer trips, the most popular extensions include further safari in Tanzania (Maasai Mara is a small part of the Serengeti ecosystem over the border), gorilla and chimpanzee tracking in Rwanda or Uganda and tropical beaches on the Kenyan Coast, Zanzibar or even the Seychelles.
The cost of safari in Amboseli
Safari in Amboseli ranges from relatively pricey to eye-watering expensive. You can expect to spend £350 to £2000 per person per night.
We are more than happy to work across this range of prices. The only important thing is that we help you find the very best safari to suit your budget.
The two dominant price factors are the length of time that you spend on safari and the specific lodges that you choose to include in your trip. Deploying more time in town, rural and beach locations can bring the total cost down dramatically.
If you have a higher budget, we will help you determine which camps do actually deliver elevated levels of service and experience. We will also highlight other subtle ways in which your trip can be raised to another level, including the use of whole camp bookings, private guides and vehicles, helicopter explorations of remote areas etc.
If you have a medium budget, the best ways to keep a lid on costs are to travel out of high season and to carefully choose lower cost lodges. You can also reduce the number of core safari nights and deploy time in lower cost beach, town and rural locations. We will help you understand where to trim and where to splash in order to achieve the best overall experience.
If you have a lower budget, then we can always look at other fundamentally less pricey safari areas.
Popular combos with a Amboseli safari
The best lodges in Amboseli
Amboseli has around 12 safari lodges, in a very wide range of styles and price levels.
We are able to include any of these properties in your trip. We ones most like to recommend fall into two categories …
Firstly, there are the truly high-end lodges, which are in the very best locations and offer the highest levels of guiding, hospitality and consistency, suitable for demanding guests. Examples include Angama Amboseli and Tawi Lodge.
Secondly, there are the relatively good value camps, which are also in excellent locations and also take their guiding very seriously, but which typically offer lower levels of luxury and have the potential to be slightly less consistent in their delivery, suitable for more easy-going guests. Examples include Porini Amboseli Camp and Tortilis Camp.
The properties that we generally prefer to avoid in Amboseli are the large sausage-factory type places, which deliver nasty low-quality safari experiences to guests who appear to be on a very different agenda. We also need to avoid very simple lodges, where the experience can be too unreliable for us to recommend.
You can always expect absolute honesty from us when describing the various lodges and camps. Our primary motivation is to figure out which ones will suit you the best.
Luxury trips
Our luxury trips to Kenya combine lodges which are in prime locations, where high levels of comfort and service are guaranteed. This does not necessarily mean infinity pools and spa facilities, but it does always mean that you will be hosted and guided by the very best people in the country. That is how to truly guarantee the quality of a safari.
Trips to Kenya
Adventure trips
In our adventure trips to Kenya, we use a much wider range of lodges, still in fabulous locations and offering authentic safari experiences, but often at considerably lower cost. More strenuous activities, like walking safari, are likely to feature more prominently. These cool, sometimes edgy lodges tend to be best suited to guests who are a little more outdoorsy and forgiving.
Your trip will be fully tailor-made. We will work with you until we are all happy that we have arrived at the ideal trip solution. Sometimes that’s a quick and easy process, other times it can take several iterations. It’s a mutual learning process.
Set 150km southeast of Nairobi, Amboseli is an iconic national park which is renowned for huge tusker elephants against a backdrop of Mount Kilimanjaro. Guest accommodation is in a wide range of properties, a handful of which are decent quality. There are major traffic and tonality issues in core areas.
Amboseli can be combined by air with other safari areas in Kenya, including Maasai Mara and Samburu, as well as crossing the border into Serengeti, Ngorongoro and Tarangire. It is also possible to extend into the primate areas of Uganda and Rwanda, as well as the tropical beaches of Zanzibar and the mainland coast.
We will help you to create your perfect Amboseli safari, using the full range of high quality ingredients.
When to go on safari to Amboseli
The safari areas of Amboseli are very seasonal. Extremely detailed knowledge of every single camp is needed to properly plan a great safari. When thinking about seasonality it is important to consider the four aspects of weather, wildlife movements, visitor traffic and prices.
Jul-Nov : Dry season
The dry season in Amboseli is generally considered to be the best time to visit.
The weather is warm and sunny, with very little chance of rain.
At this time of year, the surrounding landscapes can become very desiccated, obliging the animals to migrate in towards the central area of springs and marshes. Wildlife viewing can be extremely strong, especially for elephants.
Unfortunately this is also the period when the visitor numbers are at their highest, particularly during the Jul-Sep peak.
Prices are at their highest.
Dec-May : Green season
During the green season, rain showers can come at any time, although are largely focussed on Mar-Apr.
As the seasonal waterholes fill and the grasses grow, the animals are able to disperse across a vast area, making wildlife viewing a lot more challenging. But the bush should be looking lovely, with plenty of wildflowers and baby animals around.
Visitor numbers should be relatively low, apart from the peak Dec-Jan holiday period and around Easter.
Although the prices in Amboseli tend not to vary that much around the year, there may be some better rates available.
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ATR is widely recognised as the world’s leading tailor-made safari company. We will help you to find a more authentic, more exciting, better value safari.
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Amboseli insider tips
Traffic
The vehicle clustering in the core swamp areas of Amboseli can be unbearable, especially during the key Jul-Sep dry season months. Traffic avoidance is challenging.
Mass market
Kenya offers a lot of low-quality mass-market tourism, much more than neighbouring countries. This also needs to be avoided.
Safari restrictions
Inside the main reserve, off-road driving and walking safari are not permitted. Another good reason to head for the neighbouring private conservancies.
Amboseli tends to feature relatively rarely in the trips that we help our guests to build. No location is perfect, but clearly Amboseli has some very significant disadvantages.
How long to spend in Amboseli
Maasai Mara
The Maasai Mara is the most famous safari in Kenya, a famously scenic and rich wildlife area, with a fantastic climate and a wide range lodges. Can be reached by direct flight from Amboseli.
Samburu
Lying to the north of Kenya, Samburu is an extremely atmospheric semi-desert reserve, set along a pretty river and with a couple of excellent private conservancy lodges.
Serengeti
The Maasai Mara represents only about 12% of the Serengeti ecosystem, the remainder lies over the border in Tanzania. However, with the land borders closed, it takes a little but of jiggery-pokery to combine the two.
Ngorongoro
The famous Ngorongoro Crater, one of the greatest natural wonders in Africa, lies on the south side of Serengeti and naturally fits into an overland safari heading south via Manyara and Tarangire, to end in Arusha.
Zanzibar
Whilst Kenya has its own tropical beaches, the allure of Zanzibar is too much for many people to resist. Flight connections are either via Nairobi, or direct from Serengeti.
Uganda
For gorilla and chimp tracking experiences, we usually look towards Uganda, with Rwanda being an alternative for very high-end trips. Flights to the respective capitals Entebbe and Kigali are either via Nairobi or Serengeti.