In creating my website, just published, with a few tweaks happening at the back-end, I had the occasion to look back through a very large archive. This task ended up dovetailing with a private Namibia-Cape Town safari that I was designing for clients disembarking from a rather exclusive ship doubling up as a residence-at-sea.

One thing led to another, with various rabbit holes entered and left. By the time I’d finished, I had before me lived, celluloid evidence of a dominant trend in the safari sector over the past five years – the demand for exclusive experience. It is a desire that has manifested in private villas and guides (me).

Given our growing consciousness as we wade through the rubble and troubled headlines of the first quarter century, this could be a tough subject, or devastatingly simple: how does one define a luxury safari experience in 2025 (we’ll assume such experience is sustainable, as there is no option)?

The experience depends on the client.

The one who loves the remote-switch that opens the floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors that invites the savanna into your bedroom. Who prefers a flat white to a cappuccino.

Or that guest who loves being first one up at the four-tent camp, sitting and stoking the fire on which the water for the bodum coffee is coming to boil. The guest who enjoys a little hands-on engagement with the safari experience. Who enjoys the option of walking trails, on which getting that perfect shot sits alongside checking for the calcium in the hyena dung as a highlight.

For some, a sense of place is key. They find comfort, maybe even happiness, in the enveloping hug of a well-appointed tent in a riverine forest. Being high on a hill in a stone lodge in the desert, or in the pool when an elephant pops in for a drink.

But then so do you. In fact you appreciate all of the above.

Nothing needs to be black and white. Getting personal, I enjoyed the mosquito net and veranda experience of Peponi beach hotel on Lamu island (note the scratched slide I found below) 20 years ago every bit as much as the aircon and sublime modcons of Noka Lodge in South Africa’s Lapalala Wilderness last year.

The same can be said for chicken-liver paté served as an ice-cream in a Cape Town art gallery. And lightly seared tuna, fire-roasted veggies and rump on the bbq-cum-braai.

An exclusive safari experience is highly subjective. Luckily there’s a little bit of everything in the world of ‘safari’, all tastes, across the budget board.

Africa has such experiences ‘in spades’, accompanied by the very, very best in service and hospitality.

PS Maybe test your industry experience and name the destinations.