A personal African safari is more than a personalised itinerary
Ask ChatGPT to plan a two-week safari in Africa and, within seconds, you can have a day-by-day itinerary. On paper, it can look like a personal African safari.
You can ask it to make the trip more luxurious, less expensive, slower, more adventurous or better suited to wildlife photography. You can change countries, replace lodges and add a few days in Zanzibar, Mauritius or the Seychelles at the end.
That is genuinely useful. It also raises an obvious question: if technology can personalise an itinerary this quickly, what is the value of talking to someone who has spent decades travelling Africa and planning these trips for other people?
For me, it starts before the itinerary.
When I’m planning a trip for someone, I usually begin by trying to understand why Africa is drawing them in the first place.
The itinerary isn’t really the starting point
When somebody contacts me, I am listening for much more than a list of destinations.
I want to get a feel for what they normally enjoy when they travel, how quickly they like to move and what sort of experience they are hoping to have. Some people are very comfortable driving themselves. Others want everything taken care of. Some are happy to give up a little comfort to reach somewhere remote, while others know that a good bed, a proper bathroom and somewhere cool to retreat to in the afternoon will make the whole trip more enjoyable.
Wildlife is usually important, often very important. But even then there are differences. For one traveller, seeing the Big Five may be the overriding priority. Someone else may care just as much about landscapes, photography, hiking, meeting local people or staying somewhere that feels a long way from everything.
Then there are travellers who want several things from one journey. They might want Cape Town, safari, wine and a few days beside the Indian Ocean. Africa gives you an enormous number of ways to combine those experiences, but not every combination works equally well.
That is why I am wary of starting with the itinerary rather than the traveller.
Sometimes the trip you ask for isn’t the trip I’d recommend
This happens quite often.
People sometimes arrive with a very fixed idea of the country they want to visit, but their dates fall at a time of year when I would rather recommend somewhere else. Rainfall, temperature and seasonal wildlife patterns can change an experience considerably.
Heat is a good example.
A few years ago, I had clients from Finland travelling in Botswana in December, when temperatures can already be very high. During their trip, an unusually severe heatwave made conditions much more difficult than expected, and they eventually decided to cut the journey short.
When they travelled with us again, this time to Kenya and Tanzania, that previous experience became part of the planning. We paid much closer attention to the properties themselves, looking for air conditioning, good airflow and somewhere comfortable to retreat to when the heat built up.
Air conditioning will never be the glamorous part of a safari brochure, but if you know that a particular traveller struggles badly with heat, it suddenly matters quite a lot.
Budget can change the recommendation too.
Botswana is one of Africa’s more expensive safari destinations, partly because of the logistics involved in reaching many of its camps. Someone may love the idea of Botswana but find that the kind of trip they have in mind simply does not sit comfortably within their budget.
In that situation, I might suggest the Caprivi region of Namibia. It can provide a very similar style of safari experience while making much more sense financially.
What matters is understanding what attracted the traveller to Botswana in the first place. If we know that, we can look for another way to give them the experience they are actually after.
Personal doesn’t have to mean unusual
Sometimes the classic itinerary is classic because it works.
If you have around 12 days in Namibia, for example, and want a good overall introduction to the country, a route through Sossusvlei, Swakopmund, Damaraland and Etosha makes a great deal of sense. I would not change it simply so that the itinerary appeared more unusual.
But two travellers following that same broad route can still have very different trips.
There may be a large choice of lodges, guides and operators along an established circuit, and the standard can vary enormously. Some properties are well known because they genuinely deserve to be. Others may photograph beautifully but be wrong for a particular traveller, while a smaller or less obvious place may offer exactly the atmosphere they are looking for.
The same applies to the Serengeti or Masai Mara during migration season. These places are famous for very good reasons, but they can also become extremely busy. The choice of camp, operator and guide starts to matter a great deal. A good guide knows how to read a sighting, when it is worth joining the activity and when there may be a better experience away from the concentration of vehicles.
Those are difficult distinctions to make from a collection of websites because, understandably, every property is presenting its best version of itself.
Having actually travelled through these areas, stayed in properties, worked with operators and heard feedback from clients changes the conversation. The broad route may be classic; the decisions inside it are where much of the personalisation happens.
Sometimes I have to tell people to slow down
This has become more noticeable as people arrive with itineraries assembled from online research or generated using AI.
Africa can look deceptively easy on a screen. Countries sit neatly beside each other on the map and an itinerary generator can quickly connect them with flights, attractions and suggested stops. Before long, somebody has Cape Town, Namibia, Botswana and Victoria Falls squeezed into ten or twelve days.
There may be a technically possible way to do it. Whether it will make for an enjoyable holiday is another question.
Distances are often greater than people expect. Transfers consume parts of days, flights do not always run at the convenient times an itinerary assumes, and packing, unpacking and moving between camps all take energy. Even a straightforward border crossing or airport connection becomes part of the experience when you have built several of them into a short trip.
I tend to favour slower safari travel. I would usually rather see somebody spend enough time somewhere to notice what is around them, instead of constantly thinking about the next departure.
But that preference still has to be balanced against the person in front of me.
We have repeat clients who come to Africa almost entirely for safari. On a recent Zambia trip, we considered building in some rest time because the itinerary was going to be fairly intense. They did not want it. They wanted safari, and lots of it, so the final trip gave them around two and a half weeks almost entirely focused on wildlife.
They may be tired at the end, but that is the holiday they wanted.
“Adventure” doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody
This is another reason a list of preferences only tells you so much.
If someone says they want an adventurous trip, I still need to know what adventure means to them. For one person it could mean sleeping under canvas somewhere remote and carrying what they need with them. For another, hiring a car and driving through an unfamiliar country may already feel like a considerable adventure.
Earlier this year, we had clients who wanted hiking to be a proper part of their Namibia trip rather than an occasional activity, so we incorporated a three-day, two-night hiking experience into the journey.
The same thing happens at the end of a safari. Not everybody wants the traditional few days on a beach in Zanzibar, Mauritius or the Seychelles. Some of our clients have preferred exploring several places along the Mozambican coast instead of checking into one resort and staying there.
Those choices usually emerge through conversation rather than from ticking a box marked “adventure” or “beach”.
So where does AI fit?
There is nothing wrong with using AI to research an African trip. It can be extremely useful for discovering places, comparing broad possibilities and helping you work out what questions to ask.
It can also personalise its answers remarkably well if you give it enough information.
The distinction I would make is between a personalised answer and first-hand judgement.
AI has not driven the road you are considering, stayed at the lodge, worked with the operator or returned to a place in different seasons. It has not had a client phone from a trip to say something is not working, then had to decide what can realistically be changed.
It also only knows what you tell it.
A conversation is less tidy than that. Someone may start by saying wildlife is their main priority and then spend ten minutes talking enthusiastically about landscapes and walking. They may insist they want to see as much as possible, but gradually reveal that what they dislike most about previous holidays was feeling rushed.
A good consultant notices those things.
Sometimes the most useful advice is not another recommendation. It is saying that one of the ideas should come out, that the season is wrong, that the journey is too ambitious, or that spending a little more in one place and less somewhere else will make a bigger difference.
And sometimes, after looking at everything, the answer is simply that the traveller’s original plan was a good one.
Where I would start
If somebody is at the beginning of planning an Africa trip, I don’t need them to arrive with a finished itinerary.
I would usually start by finding out what is drawing them to Africa, when they are thinking of travelling and what they most want to get out of the experience.
From there, we can talk about how they like to travel. Some people enjoy a faster pace and want every day to feel full. Others need time to stop. Some want independence and self-driving; others would rather have the logistics handled for them. Budget matters too, not because the objective is to spend up to a number, but because it helps determine where money will genuinely improve the trip and where it will not.
Once those things become clearer, the destinations and route usually start to make more sense.
Already have a plan? Bring it with you
There is no need to throw away the research you’ve already done before speaking to me.
If you have bookmarked lodges, saved Instagram posts, built a route in Google Maps, received an itinerary from another source or asked ChatGPT to plan the whole thing, send it through.
That gives us something useful to talk about.
I can tell you which parts I think work, where I would be cautious, whether I think you are trying to fit too much in and whether there are other options worth considering. Sometimes I may suggest something quite different. At other times, I may tell you that you have already landed on the right broad route and we simply need to make the choices within it.
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