This article was produced by National Geographic Traveler (UK).
Thirty years ago, when Bex Ndlovu started guiding near a village in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, safaris were very different. Back then, functional camps were the norm, offering simple, back-to-nature experiences for rugged wildlife enthusiasts. Interaction with the animals was more important than comfort with the creatures. “It wasn’t so much the nature of the accommodation, it was the experience of spending time in these remote places with your guide,” Ndlovu says.
Since then, what he calls “luxury spaces” have boomed in popularity, driven by changing customer tastes for upscale, relaxed experiences. “It’s become an arms race” at campsites, says Chris McIntyre, director of Expert Africa, which specializes in high-quality, bespoke, sustainable safaris to southern and eastern Africa. Spa treatments, infinity pools and world-class cuisine are fast becoming the standard. “The comfort level is continuing to rise,” he says.
This has led to rising prices for safaris, which were already expensive due to a “high price, low density” business model to protect delicate ecosystems. It’s now not uncommon to spend more than £1,000 per person per night. A bespoke 10-day trip for the family to a luxury camp in places like Botswana or Namibia can run into five or six figures. “Prices have skyrocketed and even more so since the pandemic,” says McIntyre.
Demand is being driven by open spaces post-COVID and bucket list migration. Africa has bounced back from recent tourism disasters as a leading continent for wildlife tourism. According to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), Africa is the continent with the fastest tourism growth in 2023, with international tourist arrivals up 96% from 2019, the strongest recovery in the world. This equates to 66.4 million international tourist arrivals, which UNWTO projects will reach 134 million by 2030.
Escape from the crisis
With demand and prices on the same upward trajectory, this could be just the boost we need for the landscape and wildlife conservation on which our entire business is based.
Indeed, the need for intervention has never been greater. Over the past half century, the world’s wildlife populations have suffered unprecedented damage, declining by two-thirds on average since 1970, according to WWF’s 2022 Living Planet Report. Sub-Saharan Africa has been the hardest hit, with significant declines of all major mammal species.
Currently, wildlife tourism accounts for 33% of Africa’s total tourism receipts.
Photo courtesy of Natural Selection Travel
The plight of the black rhinoceros illustrates this staggering vulnerability: in just 25 years to 1995, poaching wiped out 96% of the population, but conservation efforts have brought the species back from the brink. Of course, poaching is not the only threat; habitat loss to agricultural expansion, deforestation and mining is equally devastating, and hunting for bushmeat is a persistent challenge. This is why conservation efforts by safari organizations tend to focus as much on educating and empowering local communities as they do on monitoring and protecting wildlife and habitat.
Luxury safaris are a key source of funding for these efforts. But luxury camps are far from the money-making machines some imagine them to be. The upfront and ongoing costs are huge. With no economies of scale, everything from construction and transportation to power and connections can be up to 50% more expensive than in urban areas. A workforce large enough to meet the generous staff-to-guest ratios required must be fed and lodged. Leases and national park fees must be paid, anti-poaching patrols funded, and big marketing budgets in place. Immersed in the wild, few visitors pass by. “Everything comes at a premium,” says Kate Hughes of Repogo Lodge, a safari group operating in South Africa.
All of this is paid for by the accommodation fees of a few guests each night. “Luxury lodges are all about exclusivity,” explains Dr Jennifer Lally, co-founder of Natural Selection, a conservation organisation with 24 camps and lodges across Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.
Dr Lally says that just having a safari camp that people visit can have a positive effect, especially in the current fight against poaching. Poachers are usually reluctant to target areas with lots of potential witnesses. But with tourists becoming increasingly educated about conservation credentials, mere presence is no longer enough. Safari organisations need to deliver tangible benefits to the environment beyond standard website advertising.
“There’s a lot of greenwashing going on,” says Dr. Lally. One common misconception is emphasizing how many local people they employ or how much land they manage. Of course, both aspects are valuable, but “it’s also just a matter of the cost of doing business,” she says. In other words, if you’re opening a remote lodge, you have no choice but to employ local people to provide services, and you also need a certain size of area for your guests to enjoy. She urges would-be safari-goers to “find out who’s making the extra effort.”
African Bush Camps is a great example: Returning to the areas he guided, Ndlovu was troubled by deforestation and the dramatic decline of wildlife, so he founded African Bush Camps in 2006. A collection of 17 camps and lodges in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia, its main aim is to conserve, but also regenerate, the land on which it works.
Projects funded by the group’s foundation include planting native fruit trees that provide wildlife cover and rewilding areas formerly used for cattle grazing. There are also “human-wildlife” initiatives, such as helping villages protect their livestock from predators to prevent retaliation killings. Rather than focusing on the surface — making token donations or putting a few solar panels on roofs and calling it a day — they take it several steps further.
A wise choice
The type of protected area you visit can be just as important, according to Justin Francis, founder and CEO of Responsible Travel, which offers more than 400 safari tours in various African destinations. He’s a strong advocate of protected areas. Unlike government-run parks and reserves, these protected areas are owned by local communities, who get a steady income in the form of lease fees and get to decide what tourism activities take place there. That brings not only revenue but buy-in.
It’s a new concept, but it’s not niche: Roughly a fifth of Kenya’s land area is under some form of protection, and just over half of that consists of community wildlife reserves—up from zero in a generation. Namibia, Uganda, and Zambia have also embraced the principle. “Protected areas are the future,” Francis says.
Overtourism is also a reality in wildlife tourism, Francis says. He points to the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, where hundreds of wildlife-watching vehicles converge every day, disrupting hunting patterns and habitats. Safaris are a force for destruction, not conservation, and the inference for consumers is clear: seek out the lesser known.
Lepogo Lodge, a pair of campsites in South Africa’s Limpopo province, definitely falls into that category. The campsites are luxurious, and the prices match: Noka Camp, with its tented villas and plunge pools, starts from 36,000 rand (£1,500) per group per night.
“We made the lodges as luxurious as possible, so we could charge a premium and raise as much money as possible,” says operations manager Kate Hughes. Shameless profiteering? Not at all. Repogo is 100% non-profit, and all but operating expenses go into programs aimed at protecting and enhancing the environment. The company helped reintroduce endangered cheetahs, the company’s signature animal, into the reserve. (“Repogo” means “cheetah” in Northern Sotho.) Another initiative has provided efficient wood-burning stoves to local communities to reduce deforestation.
Prices for tented villas at Noka Camp, part of Lepogo Lodge in South Africa’s Limpopo province, start from £1,500 per night per couple.
Photo courtesy of Lepogo Lodges
The amount of money that could be raised is staggering: just one family booking exclusively at the 12-bed Noka camp for eight days could raise £30,000 for Repogo’s conservation work. “For us, it’s a no-brainer,” says Hughes. “We have to leave a legacy of conservation.”
Wolwedans, in southwestern Namibia, is another conservation-minded organization that caters to the wealthy. It was founded in 1995 to bring in revenue for the 800-square-mile NamibRand Nature Reserve. “Profit was seen as a by-product, not a goal,” recalls owner Stefan Bruckner.
It has since expanded into a portfolio of five luxury lodges and camps, attracting A-list celebrities and industry leaders, and raking in 30 million Namibian dollars (£1.3 million) from park entrance fees alone. The region’s iconic oryx is now thriving, and wealthy visitors help fund initiatives such as a centre that provides vocational training to Namibian youth.
“Half of what’s produced here goes back into the community and conservation,” Bruckner says. “We need to give it back to our kids.”
Bruckner believes the greatest potential for conservation lies with the super-rich end of the market: “They’re willing to pay a premium if they know it’s for a good cause. There’s a lot of potential.”
Wolwedans is a founding member of The Long Run, which was established in 2009. The Long Run is a collection of more than 60 nature-based tourism businesses (one third of which are safari camps and lodges) committed to promoting sustainability. In Wolwedans’ words, it provides a framework for its members and partners to “build sustainability” into their business models. In practice, this means everything from site visits and action plans to event organization and remote support. Together, the Wolwedans work to protect around 25 million acres of land. The focus is on the “4C” sustainability model – conservation, community and culture – but also commerce, as only stable businesses can provide the long-term support that is clearly needed.
And the uncomfortable truth is, it’s necessary. An addiction has been created around wildlife tourism, and banning that process would quickly lead to devastation, says McIntyre. There would be no income or incentive to protect nature reserves and the animals that roam the areas. Agriculture, logging, mining and hunting would all move in. “It would be the end of the road for many of the reserves, and the end of the road for the animals,” says McIntyre.
It’s a dependency laid bare by the pandemic’s tourism slump. “As long as people are coming to Africa, there’s funding to do all this,” Ndlovu says. “But as we’ve seen with COVID-19, if people don’t travel for two or three years, it’s very easy to undo all the good work that’s been done.”
The solution, he says, is simple: set aside funds so conservation can continue even in tough times. Inspired by this principle, his organization launched Africa Change Makers last year, which sets aside $10 for each guest it receives as a “fund.” This year it expects to net $300,000, and if it continues to grow, Ndlovu says, it could generate an additional $2 million to $3 million a year in conservation funding.
“We as an industry need to protect ourselves so that the next crisis will come and we can continue to do business,” he says. And in Africa, that’s always just around the corner: At the time of writing, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi had declared national disasters following devastating droughts, when waterholes dry up, wildlife dies, camps suffer as tourists stay away and costs soar.
McIntyre is optimistic. “Often it’s three steps forward and one step back,” he says, “but most of the industry understands that they need to help protect and develop local communities, or the industry won’t exist.”
And there is something we can do, says Dr Lally. “Do safaris help conservation? Of course, there’s no question about it,” she says. “But people have to make wise choices.”
Featured in the September 2024 issue of National Geographic Traveler (UK).
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