Most of our guests tend to deploy 8 to 14 nights in Africa, of which anything from 3 to 9 nights are spent actually on safari in Botswana. Combining with other locations like tropical beaches, rural areas, Victoria Falls and Cape Town can add variety into a trip and help to keep a lid on costs.

8 to 14 nights

Longer trips of 15 to 21 nights tend to include 6 to 12 nights on safari, usually split across two to five different areas, sometimes in two or more countries. Longer explorations of non-safari areas such as the Western Cape (Cape Town, Whale Coast, Cape Winelands) also become possible and are incredibly good value.

15 to 21 nights

We absolutely love putting together trips of 22 to 50 nights, or even longer. Sometimes we are lucky enough to work with guests who are taking a sabbatical from work or who are retired and just love to travel. In these trips, the possibilities become almost infinite and can include a half dozen or more countries.

22 to 50 nights

Our safari experts have incredible 
first-hand knowledge and an average
of 12 years experience building great 
trips.

Expertise and experience

Since 1999, we have created over a million sample  trips and helped over 120,000 guests fall in love with  safari Africa.

A proud history

Over the years we have polished our operation to be super-reliable. Arranging your trip should be almost as much fun  as going on safari. 

Seamless and fun

Your trip should cost no more than if 
you had booked all the components directly. You effectively get our services for free.

Delivering value

Every single trip that we build is unique. Your trip will be precisely tailored to meet the exact requirements of everyone in your group.

Supremely tailor-made

The first safari company on the internet, we helped to shape the modern safari and we continue to be the prime innovators in our field.

Original innovators

Tell us your whatever you know about your ideal trip. Whether you're drawn to specific wildlife, particular regions, or have preferences about the style of accommodation, the more we understand, the better we can help you to craft the perfect experience.

Share your ideas

This is the core dry season in the Central Kalahari. Conditions are arid, wildlife is widely dispersed and sightings focus on desert specialists and predators. Visitor numbers are low and daytime conditions are excellent.

May–Sep 

October is the hottest and most demanding month in the Central Kalahari. Wildlife activity continues, but temperatures and humidity rise sharply, making conditions uncomfortable in camps and during game drives.

October

This season brings summer rains, transforming parts of the desert. Migratory herbivores cluster after showers, attracting predators and creating intense but unpredictable wildlife events. Visitor numbers are low and prices are attractive. 

Nov-Mar 

April is a transition month as rains fade and conditions dry. Wildlife remains present, landscapes are still green and safari conditions improve ahead of the long dry season.

April

Your dedicated safari specialist will work with you to build a selection of sample trips. We'll discuss seasonality, wildlife movements, logistics, lodge options, activity levels, whatever is necessary. And we will keep on refining until we are all confident that we have reached the perfect trip.

Crafting your trip

Everything is arranged. All you need to do is turn up. You probably won’t even need to show your paperwork, you will simply glide from one group of friendly and efficient local hosts to the next. And our support team remains on hand throughout, leaving you free to focus entirely on the extraordinary experiences ahead.

Travel with confidence

Many of us here at ATR have travelled extensively with our own kids, so we know for a fact that safari is great for families.

This is the kind of trip that guarantees to generate memories that you will share for the rest of your lives.

However, there are significant health issues to consider in most safari areas, so we need to proceed with caution.

Most dry season safari is ideal for kids of 12 years and older, eminently feasible for kids 8-11 years and potentially viable from 6-7 years old. If your kids are 0-5 years, then it’s probably best to stick to the non-malarial areas of the Cape, then progressing up into Namibia as they get older.

Family safari 

Safari is an inherently romantic experience that can be endlessly tailored to suit you.

We have been helping guests to build awesome honeymoons for many years. We have intimate knowledge of some of the wildest and most romantic places in the world.

Perhaps the most important piece of advice is to be yourselves. Please don’t feel it is necessary to fit into the usual romantic tropes if they’re not for you. Just focus on having a great trip.

We very much understand the importance of these trips, we know that your honeymoon needs to really hit the heights and be a truly life-punctuating experience.

Honeymoon safari 

On safari, luxury means different things to different people.

The most conventional meaning is that the accommodations are extremely comfortable, with elevated levels of hospitality. This is relatively easy to deliver, there are lots of luxury lodges.

However, simply inserting more luxurious lodges into your trip is no guarantee of a better safari. In fact, the opposite can be true.

For us, the hallmarks of a truly high quality safari are a suitably slow pace, wonderful remote locations, superb safari guiding, exclusive and intense wildlife interaction, precisely tailored experiences and considered attention to detail. We can do that.

Luxury safari 

During the May-Oct dry season, Botswana is the most expensive safari location in Africa, with prices in the range USD 1000-5000 per person per night. However, during the Nov-Mar green season prices can drop as low as USD 500-750.

Twelve night trips can therefore range from around USD 5000 all the way up to and beyond 50,000 per person. 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 specific lodges that you choose to include in your trip and how many people you are bringing (solo safari can be impractically expensive, economies of scale cut in from around 4-6 guests).

Importantly, the quality of the core safari experience does not generally vary with price. The upper end of the price range is for the most polished and luxurious lodges, where the safari experience tends to be easier and more leisurely. Camps in the middle and lower range are mostly very comfortable, but the guests tend to be more focused on the wildlife.

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 during the Jan-Mar late green season and to carefully choose heavily discounted lodges. You can also reduce the number of core safari nights and deploy time in more cost-effective beach, town and rural locations (notably the Cape). 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, we can focus on fundamentally less pricey safari countries (South Africa or Namibia) and think about last-minute booking options, which can deliver some extraordinary discounts.

"We just returned from a weeks safari organized  organized   organized by ATR and have nothing but positive reviews!"

Okavango Delta

Set in the heart of the Kalahari Desert in the northwest of Botswana, the Okavango Delta is a stunningly beautiful and vibrant wetland, with intensely rich and varied wildlife, offering a very wide range of wet and dry safari activities.

Miraculously, the flood arrives from Angola during the long desert dry season, May to August, acting as a magnet for wildlife from a vast hinterland. However, the wildlife here in Okavango is very strong year round.

Guest accommodation in the Okavango is in around 50 mostly very high quality and famously pricey lodges.

Virtually all safaris to Botswana include at least a few nights in this area, with some trips focusing entirely on the delta.

Lodges USD 500-5000 pppn 

Linyanti Waterfront 

Set in the northwest of Botswana, the Linyanti Waterfront is one of the finest safari areas in Africa, renowned for huge herds of elephants, intense predator action and wild-dog denning.

The area enjoys a similar flood season as the Okavango Delta, centred on May to August, although it is more in the form of swollen rivers than a true wetland flood.

Guest accommodation is in a diverse range of around a dozen high quality camps and lodges across four private concession areas..

If you are combining two or more camps in Botswana, then one of them should probably be here, especially during the Jun-Oct dry season.

Lodges USD 800-5000 pppn 

Makgadikgadi

Set in the centre of Botswana, Makgadikgadi is a vast and hypnotic open grassland, centred on a network of epic salt pans and dotted with isolated islands of palm and baobab trees.

The area is renowned for hosting a vast zebra and wildebeest migration during the Nov-Feb green season, but is great to visit year round.

Guest accommodation is in a really interesting range of around a dozen camps, offering an unusually  wide range of safari activities, including habituated meerkats, Bushmen interaction, palaeontology and quad-biking.

If you intend to combine three or more camps in Botswana, then you should definitely consider including this amazing place.

Lodges USD 500-5000 pppn 

Nxai Pan 

Set in northeastern Botswana, Nxai Pan is a broad, grassy savannah dotted with acacia islands and famed for its seasonal herds and iconic baobab trees.

This is a seasonal safari area where wildlife concentrations and migrations shape the experience, with open plains and minimal infrastructure giving a sense of space and solitude.

During the Nov-Mar summer rains, vast zebra and wildebeest migrations sweep through the area, attracting predators and prolific birdlife.

Guest accommodation is centered on the excellent Nxai Pan Camp, which allows direct wildlife viewing from camp and excursions to the famous Baines’ Baobabs.

Nxai Pan only tends to feature in return visits to Botswana, and then only rarely, it really is a rather niche location.

Lodges USD 800-1750 pppn 

Chobe

Set in the north of Botswana, Chobe is the heart of a vast conservation area, a very important national park, and with a long-established reputation for prodigious wildlife.

However, Chobe is also the location that hosts the majority of the overland traffic in Botswana, which means that it can get very busy and generally offers a much lower quality of wilderness experience compared with the famous private concessions of Okavango and Linyanti.

Guest accommodation is in around a dozen lodges, plus some very large campgrounds. These are supplemented by a swathe of accommodation in the town of Kasane, at the north end of the reserve.

We generally try to avoid the Chobe area, although it does occasionally feature in trips when guests want to return to specific areas that they visited many years ago.

Lodges USD 250-2500 pppn 

Tuli Block 

Set in the southeast of Botswana, Tuli Block is a very large private reserve which offers arguably the best non-malarial safari area in Africa.

The area contains a good range of landscapes, with rocky mountains, open hillsides and open savanna. The wildlife populations are rich, with particularly notable populations of lions, leopards and elephants.

Guest accommodation is in a handful of lodges, most of which offer an unusually wide range of activities, including walking safari, mountain hiking and hides.

The Tuli Block is totally separate from the other safari areas in Botswana, with which it is almost never combined. Far more likely that you travel in via Johannesburg and combine with locations across South Africa.

Lodges USD 400-3000 pppn 

A few days at the Victoria Falls can work really well at the front end of a Botswana safari, there’s some lovely lodges, the falls are impressive and there’s loads of other interesting activities in the area.

Victoria Falls 

Cape Town, the Cape Winelands and the Whale Coast all contain fabulous lodges and offer great value for money. Direct flights from Maun make this a very easy combo.

The Cape 

For fabulous tropical beaches, Mozambique offers a wide range of medium and high priced lodges. The only downside is that you will probably need an overnight in Johannesburg on the way.

Mozambique

Vast emptiness

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve is huge, four times the size of the Serengeti, yet it only experiences a trickle of visitors. These apparently featureless plains are, in fact, a network of ancient fossilised dune ridges and underlying river valleys, long since dried out.

San Bushmen

The Kalahari is the spiritual home of the San people, an ancient tribe of hunter-gatherers, whose knowledge of their natural environment is unsurpassed. Spending time with these wonderful people is a privilege beyond measure.

Literary connections 

If you have read the fabulous book “Cry of the Kalahari”, then you may find yourself overcome with a powerful urge to visit the renowned Deception Valley. In fact, this is perhaps the biggest single motivation to visit this rare backwater.