Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Gorilla Luxury Safaris is about the sequence a gorilla trip actually has to be planned in: choose the country, secure permits for specific dates, choose a lodge near the trailhead the permit fixes, and understand a total dominated by a line no lodge controls.

The fact at the centre of it is that gorilla trekking is close to unique in luxury travel — the expensive version and the modest version see exactly the same thing. Permits are issued by a national authority at a fixed price, the number of visitors per family per day is capped, and the time with them is one hour. None of that varies with what you paid for your bed, and anybody implying otherwise is selling.

What a lodge genuinely affects is how far you drive to the briefing, how warm you are at altitude the night before, and what happens to soaked boots afterwards. Those are worth real money on a demanding day. They are not access.

The strongest advice we give here is to book two treks rather than one, because a trek is unpredictable and one permit is a single roll of the dice on what is, for many people, the most expensive hour of their travelling lives. We earn nothing on permits — they are a pass-through to the authority — which is worth knowing when you read that recommendation. Specific figures such as permit prices, group sizes and minimum ages do change, so where we give them we hedge and confirm the current position for your dates.

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 Rwanda and Uganda guides, each going deeper on one subject than a single site could. This one is Gorilla Luxury Safaris: No amount of money buys better access to a gorilla family. These are the ones that sit closest to it:

• Luxury Gorilla Safari — The trek itself: fitness, the hour with the family, photography, and whether to add chimps.
• East African Luxury — Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda at the top end, and how the four genuinely differ.
• Luxury Safari Planner — Planning a luxury safari across East and Southern Africa: what the money actually buys, and how to spend it well.
• Bespoke East Africa — The building blocks — parks, conservancies, concessions — and how they combine into a route.

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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