South Africa Tour FAQs

There is no fixed price, because there is no fixed tour. Cost depends on your dates, group size, choice of lodges and how much specialist access is built in — a private photography hide and a professional photographer for eight days sits at a very different level from a standard game drive. What we can promise is a complete, itemised, obligation-free quote before you commit to anything, with every lodge named. Our quotes include everything except tips and travel insurance.

It depends entirely on what you came for, which is why a single answer is usually wrong. For Big Five game viewing, the dry winter months of May to September concentrate animals around water and thin the vegetation. For Cape Town, the Garden Route and hiking, the summer months of November to March are warm and dry. For Southern Right whales on the Cape Whale Coast, June to December. For birding, the austral summer of October to March brings the migrants. Tell us the priority and we will build around the right season.

Six to nine months for peak season, and longer if you want a specific lodge or a specific specialist host. Our guides are working professionals with their own calendars, so the further ahead you plan, the more likely you are to get the person you want. We do take shorter-notice bookings when availability allows.

Yes, and South Africa is the best country in Africa for it, mainly because of its malaria-free Big Five reserves. Madikwe and Pilanesberg offer full Big Five game viewing with no need for anti-malarial medication for anyone in the family, which removes the single biggest concern most parents raise. We pair those reserves with lodges that genuinely welcome children rather than merely permitting them.

We have hosted children from about four years old upward. Below roughly six, we shorten game drives, book lodges with family units and a pool, and build in more downtime. Some private reserves set their own minimum ages for open-vehicle drives — we will tell you which ones before you book rather than after.

Yes, and they are among our most common family bookings. The practical difficulty is pace — grandparents and eight-year-olds want different days. We solve it with a private vehicle, so the group can split for part of a day and come back together for the parts that matter.

Named places most itineraries skip. Private reserves in the Greater Kruger rather than the busy southern gates, the malaria-free Madikwe and Pilanesberg reserves, and Western Cape regions such as the Cederberg, the Overberg, De Hoop Nature Reserve and the Karoo. You travel privately, not in a coach group, and on several routes you can go a full day without passing another tour vehicle.

A working professional in the field your journey is built around — a wildlife photographer on the photography safari, a field researcher on the conservation safari, a specialist birding guide on the birding tour. Not a driver with a general licence and broad knowledge. This is the whole premise of the company: a rhino conservation trip should be run by a field researcher.

Yes. Photography with birding, golf with a family safari, wellness with the Whale Coast — all common. Every journey is fully customisable and none of them are fixed departures, so combining is a design question rather than a booking obstacle.

South Africa is our specialism and where all ten of our themed journeys run. We can extend an itinerary into Botswana, the Okavango, Victoria Falls or Eswatini where it genuinely serves the theme — but we will not bolt on a country simply to make a brochure look fuller.