When looking up Safaris I noticed that it can be a daunting job. There are a lot of things to consider when looking for a safari:
- how to search
- timeline and price (your dates, price/ budget)
- safety
- ethical tours
Getting started:
Tours can range from one day to multiple weeks. When planning your safari, it’s easiest to fly into Arusha, Tanzania in order to start the tour there. If you wanted to start in Dar es Salaam, then tour companies would likely drive you all the way up, or just figure out a flight for you. The drive from Dar es Salaam to Arusha is long and known to be a tough journey on old winding roads, so it may be best to just fly.
How to Search for Safaris
When we began our search for safaris, we used:
- Googled Tanzania Safaris- this helped us initially find prices
- Reddit- searched on Reddit to see what other travellers choose
- Asked others- people who have been to Tanzania gave us some recommendations, as well as influencers who have used certain companies.
- Trip advisor- looking at top-rated safaris, searched ones we had heard about.
In the end, we ended up choosing a safari that was recommended on Reddit. It had the best prices and didn’t require a middleman to help set up a tour, the company is local to Tanzania, which was also a positive.
Time and Budget
When searching for a safari, we needed to decide how many days we wanted to spend on the tour, but that very much influenced our budget. We were quoted at approximately $300.00 USD a day, with luxury camping. That includes food, water, chef, driver, accommodation, transit, park fees, and *some gratuities (this can change from company to company). In all, it was pricing to be more expensive than we originally anticipated, so we continued shopping around online. we wanted our budget to stay under $2500.00 CDN for the full safari price and wanted to do multiple days. If doing a private tour, it can sometimes be more expensive, but depending on the number of people you are travelling with, sometimes it can even out quite nicely. with every tour, there are 6 people max, that is so that everyone can have a window seat. For ourselves, we ended up settling for the camping option (literally camping in tents), and for 5 nights on a shared tour (with 4 other people in our car). it was our cheapest option, ensuring the max amount of days is spent viewing wildlife!
Safety/ Scams
With hunting for a safari company there are things to consider around safety personal safety, but also finances. Of course, you need to decide what level of luxury you are willing to do, for us, we are big Canadian campers and decided on tents. For some, this may be seen as risky especially if there are lions and cheetahs around, luckily we Canadians are used to bears sniffing at our tents, so our comfort level may be different than others. We also learned that there will be an armed guard that stays away to ensure our safety throughout the night, which was nice. Financially, when looking for tours, we noticed that some companies wanted their customers to send them e-transfers for payment, for us, this felt a little uncomfortable and so we voted against it.
Ethical tours
This wasn’t something that I considered the right way when searching but then saw a post on it and decided to dig deeper. This website explains it well:
as always, hope my tips and tricks can be helpful for planning your own adventure!
–Miss Mac x
