Do luxury safaris make a difference?

Thirty years ago, when Beks Ndlovu was starting out as a guide near his village in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, safaris were a different beast. Then, it was all functional camps offering back-to-nature simplicity for gnarly wildlife enthusiasts — more animal encounters than creature comforts. “It wasn’t so much about the nature of the accommodation as the experience — spending time in these remote places with your guide,” he says.

In the intervening years, what he calls the “luxury space” has surged in popularity, driven by changing customer tastes towards high-end, relaxing experiences. For the camps, “it’s become an arms race,” says Chris McIntyre, head of Expert Africa, which specialises in high-quality, tailor-made and sustainable safaris to Southern and East Africa. Spa treatments, infinity pools and world-class gastronomy are rapidly becoming the norm. “Comfort levels have continued to march upwards,” he says.

This has translated to soaring prices for safaris that — enshrined in a ‘high-price, low-density’ business model to protect the delicate ecosystems in which they operate — were already expensive. Now, spending more than £1,000 a night per person is not uncommon. Take the family for 10 days on a tailor-made trip to an exclusive camp in the likes of Botswana or Namibia and five-, even six-figure outlays are possible. “The prices have shot up and, post pandemic, we’re seeing that even more,” says McIntyre.

The demand is fuelled partly by the post-Covid migration towards open spaces and carpe-diem bucket-list endeavours; Africa — as the leading continent for wildlife tourism — has bounced back from the touristic carnage of recent years. It was the continent with the fastest tourism growth in 2023, according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), with international arrivals at 96% of 2019 levels — the strongest recovery in the world. That translated to 66.4m international visitors, a figure the UNWTO predicts could hit 134m by 2030.

Back from the brink

With demand and prices locked in the same upwards trajectory, surely that’s a much-needed fillip for the conservation of the landscapes and wildlife that underpin the whole enterprise?

Certainly the need for intervention has never been greater: the past half-century has seen unprecedented harm wrought on global wildlife populations — depleted by an average of two-thirds since 1970 according to the WWF’s Living Planet Report of 2022. Sub-Saharan Africa has been at the sharp end, suffering significant declines in all its major mammals.

The alarming fragility was exemplified by the plight of the black rhino. With poaching helping to wipe out 96% of the population in just 25 years up to 1995, conservation efforts pulled the species back from the brink. Of course it’s not just poaching that poses a threat; habitat loss caused by agricultural expansion, deforestation and mining can be equally destructive, while the hunting of game for bushmeat is an enduring challenge. It’s the reason why conservation efforts on the part of safari organisations tend to focus as much on the education and empowerment of local communities as they do on the monitoring and protection of wildlife and habitat.

High-end safaris offer a vital source of funds for such efforts — though luxury camps are far from the money-printing machines some might imagine. The outlays, both initial and ongoing, are enormous. With zero economies of scale, everything from construction and transport to power and connectivity can be up to 50% higher than in urban areas. A workforce large enough to service the generous staff-to-guest ratios demanded must be fed and accommodated. There are lease and national park fees to pay, anti-poaching patrols to finance and a hefty marketing budget; when you’re immersed in the wilderness, there’s not much passing trade. “Everything carries a premium,” says Kate Hughes of Lepogo Lodges, a safari group operating in South Africa.

All of this has to be financed through a handful of guests staying each night. “With higher-end lodges, it’s all about exclusivity,” explains Dr Jennifer Lalley, co-founder of Natural Selection, a conservation-driven collection of 24 camps and lodges across Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.

Just having a safari camp that people visit has a positive benefit, according to Dr Lalley, particularly with the ongoing battle against poaching — poachers typically think twice about targeting areas with lots of potential witnesses. But, with travellers increasingly savvy when it comes to conservation credentials, a mere presence is no longer enough. A safari organisation needs to have tangible benefits on its environment, above the standard website bluster.

“There’s a lot of greenwashing out there,” says Dr Lalley. One common misdirection is to play up the number of local people employed or acres looked after. Both aspects are worthwhile, of course — “yet also just the costs of doing business,” she says. In other words, open a remote lodge, and you have no option but to employ locals to service it, and you also need a certain-sized area for your guests to enjoy. She urges would-be safari-goers to “find out who’s going the extra mile”.

African Bush Camps is an exemplar of this. Tormented by returning to areas in which he’d guided only to find deforestation and decimated wildlife, Ndlovu set up African Bush Camps in 2006. It’s a collection of 17 camps and lodges in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia whose principal focus is not just conserving the land in which they operate but regenerating it.

Projects that the organisation’s foundation have funded include planting native fruit trees to offer shelter to wildlife and rewilding areas that have been used in the past for cattle grazing. ‘Human-wildlife co-existence’ initiatives have also been implemented, including helping villages protect livestock from predators to prevent retaliation killings. Rather than focusing on the superficial — making token financial donations, throwing a couple of solar panels on the roof and calling it a day — they go multiple steps further.

Choosing wisely

The type of protected land you visit can be just as important, according to Justin Francis, founder and CEO of Responsible Travel, which offers more than 400 safaris across a range of African destinations. He’s a strong advocate for conservancies. Unlike government-operated parks or reserves, these are owned by local communities who receive a consistent income in the form of a lease fee and have the deciding say in the tourism activity that goes on — thereby creating not just income but buy-in.

It’s a new concept but not a niche one. Roughly a fifth of Kenya’s land mass is protected in some shape or form, and just over half of that is made up of community wildlife conservancies — up from zero in a generation. Namibia, Uganda and Zambia are also embracing the principle. “Conservancies are the future,” says Francis.

Overtourism is a reality in wildlife tourism too, says Francis. He mentions Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, where hundreds of wildlife-viewing vehicles a day converge, disturbing hunting patterns and habitats. It’s safari as a destructive rather than conserving force, and the inference for the consumer is clear: seek the lesser-known.

Lepogo Lodges, a brace of camps in South Africa’s Limpopo province, certainly falls into that bracket. The camps are lavish, with prices to match. Noka Camp, with its tented villas and plunge pools, starts at ZAR 36,000 (£1,500) per couple per night.

“We created our lodges to be as luxurious as possible so we could charge a premium rate and raise as much money as we could,” says operations director Kate Hughes. Shameless profiteering? Hardly. Lepogo is 100% non-profit, ploughing everything beyond its operating costs into schemes designed to preserve and enhance the environment. It sponsored the reintroduction of the endangered cheetah onto the reserve, a totemic animal for the business (‘lepogo’ means ‘cheetah’ in Northern Sotho). Another initiative saw them provide local communities with efficient wood-burning stoves to reduce deforestation.

The amounts that can be raised are mind-boggling: a family booking 12-bed Noka Camp exclusively for eight days could yield up to £30,000 alone for Lepogo’s conservation efforts. “For us it’s a no-brainer,” says Hughes. “We need to leave a conservation legacy.”

Wolwedans, in southwestern Namibia, is another organisation with conservation on its mind and high-net-worth individuals in its sights. It was established in 1995 specifically to generate income for the 800sq-mile NamibRand Nature Reserve. “Profit was seen as a by-product not the purpose,” recalls owner Stephan Brückner.

This has since been expanded to a portfolio of five exclusive lodges and camps, which attracts a roster of A-listers and captains of industry and has netted N$30m (£1.3m) in park fees alone. The area’s emblematic oryx are now thriving, and affluent visitors have funded initiatives including a centre providing vocational training to young Namibians.

“Half of what is generated here goes back into the community and conservation,” says Brückner. “We owe it to our children.”

Brückner believes that it’s at the ultra-affluent end of the market that the conservation potential is greatest. “Wealthy people are happy to pay a premium if they know it’s a good cause. There’s huge potential.”

Wolwedans was a founding member of The Long Run in 2009 — a collective of more than 60 nature-based tourism businesses, a third of them safari camps or lodges, committed to driving sustainability. In their words, they provide a framework for members and partners to ‘embed sustainability’ into their business models, which in practice means everything from site visits and action plans to organising events and remote support. Together they help safeguard nearly 25m acres of land. The focus is on the ‘4Cs’ sustainability model: conservation, community, culture — but also commerce, because only stable businesses can offer the long-term support that’s so patently needed.

And the uncomfortable truth is that it is a need. A dependency has been created around wildlife tourism; outlaw the process and the devastation would be swift, according to McIntyre. There’d be no income, or incentive, to protect the wildernesses, or the creatures that roam those areas. Agriculture, logging, mining and hunters would all sweep in. “It would be curtains for a lot of the reserves and it would be curtains in terms of the animals,” says McIntyre.

It’s a dependency that was exposed by the touristic hiatus of the pandemic. “As long as people are coming to Africa, there’s cash flow for us to do these activities,” says Ndlovu. “But when people don’t travel for two, three years, like we saw in Covid, it’s very easy to write off all the good work.”

The solution, he says, is simple: put money aside to ensure conservation can continue in hard times. The principle inspired his organisation to start Africa Change Makers last year, a scheme where $10 is put into a ‘war chest’ for every guest per night. This year, it’s expected to net $300,000; if it goes on growing that could be $2–$3m a year in extra conservation capital, says Ndlovu.

“We as an industry need to protect ourselves so that we have a business after the next crisis,” he says. And, in Africa, that’s always just round the corner. At the time of writing, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi had all declared national disasters following devastating drought. During such times, watering holes dry up, so wildlife dies out, and camps struggle as travellers are put off, while costs go in the opposite direction.

McIntyre is optimistic. “It’s often three steps forward, one step back,” he says. “But most of the industry now understands that you need to support conservation and development of local communities — or you won’t have an industry.”

And we can do our bit, says Dr Lalley. “If you ask whether safaris can help conservation efforts, then absolutely. Without a doubt,” she says. “But people have to choose wisely.”