Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Okavango Delta Luxury treats the Delta as a timing problem rather than a destination, because that is what it is. This is not a place you choose; it is a place you time.

The Okavango rises in the Angolan highlands. The rain that fills it falls there in the southern summer and the water then takes months to travel down the river and out across the Kalahari sands, so the Delta is at its fullest during Botswana’s dry, cool season. The water calendar and the rainfall calendar run in opposition, and every planning decision here follows from that one fact.

The practical consequence is that a camp’s activity list — boats, mokoro and island walking, or vehicles, night drives and predators — is a function of the month you arrive far more than it is a fixed property of the camp. So the useful question is not "does this camp do mokoro trips?" but "on my exact dates, what will the activities at this camp be?". Asking it prevents the commonest Botswana disappointment.

We give month ranges as tendencies rather than dates, and we say so. The flood is a natural system fed by rainfall in another country, it varies genuinely from year to year in both timing and volume, and anybody offering a firm date for water arriving at a particular camp is guessing. We also hold no photography of Botswana, so the images here are close wildlife subjects and camp interiors from elsewhere in the region rather than pictures implying a place.

We are not a safari operator. We do not own camps and we do not drive the vehicles.

Who arranges the safaris

When you send an enquiry it goes to Nomad Africa, our partner travel agency in Kenya. They build your itinerary, price it, hold the bookings, take the payments and look after you on the ground from the airport pickup to the flight home.

They plan and operate directly in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana and Zanzibar, which is the whole of what we publish guides to. Where we do not have that depth, we say so rather than taking the enquiry.

It is one partnership, not a marketplace. We do not put your enquiry out to a panel of operators and we do not pass your details to anyone else.

The rules we write to

• No invented reviews. If you see a testimonial here, a real person wrote it and gave us permission to publish it with their name.
• No invented statistics or credentials. We do not claim licences, memberships, awards or numbers we cannot document.
• No promises about animals. Nobody can guarantee a river crossing or a leopard, and any site that implies otherwise is selling.
• Ranges, not fake precision. Where we publish costs they are clearly marked as indicative planning ranges. Your quote is the exact number.
• We say when something will not work. If your budget does not reach what you are picturing, or your dates are wrong for what you want to see, that goes in the first reply.

Part of a network

We publish a family of specialist the Okavango guides, each going deeper on one subject than a single site could. This one is Okavango Delta Luxury: The activity list is a function of the month, not a property of the camp. These are the ones that sit closest to it:

• Okavango Luxury — What the Delta’s best camps actually offer, and what the nightly rate is buying.
• Botswana Safari Collection — Botswana region by region: the Okavango, the Linyanti, Chobe and the Kalahari.
• Exclusive Botswana Safaris — Why Botswana costs what it does: private concessions, bed levies and a deliberate low-volume model.
• Luxury Safari Planner — Planning a luxury safari across East and Southern Africa: what the money actually buys, and how to spend it well.

They share this partnership and this editorial standard, and they link to each other wherever a question genuinely belongs on one of the others rather than here.

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