Why choose us

ATR is the world-leading tailor-made safari company.

It took us many years to reach the point where we felt comfortable using that strapline, it seemed such a brash and sweeping statement. Now we use it as inspiration, every single day, every single trip.

The bottom line is that we put together great safaris, more elegantly, more efficiently, more reliably, at better prices and in greater numbers than just about any other company.

That might make it sound like we are some kind of huge corporation, but in reality the safari world is a very intimate space. We remain a relatively small, owner-operated company, with modest offices in the USA, UK and South Africa.

Since our foundation back in 1999, we have successfully managed to help over 100,000 guests explore the great wildernesses. The vast majority have absolutely fallen in love with these amazing places, their wildlife and their people.

For many of our guests, their trip has quite literally been a life-changing event. You can expect something very special.

taking excellence seriously

All have us have fallen in love with wilderness travel and conservation from an early age. We have a deep affinity for the places that we include in trips.

Conservation has been our primary purpose from day one. From the outset, we realised that the only practicable way to protect the great wild landscapes in our world is through responsible tourism.

After decades of successfully following this path, in 2024 we joined the Nawiri Group, a major conservation organisation. They asked us to join because they are aware of our integrity and recognise the essential part that we have played in this arena over the decades.

We will continue to be driven by conservation. Every single trip helps. Your trip will help.

responsible travel is the primary driver of conservation

The main reason that we have been successful over the years is simply because we help our guests to build great trips.

More specifically, we make sure that the right people visit exactly the right places, in the correct order, at the right pace and at the right time of year. It sounds simple, but that really is the magic formula.

We put an extraordinary amount of effort into getting that right. On the one hand, we know every single location and lodge inside out. On the other hand, we take the time to get to know our guests. Only then can the match be made with confidence.

We aim to deliver your trip with levels of service, expertise and ethics far beyond the usual expectations of a regular travel company.

getting the right people to the right places

We are a group of around forty individuals who are absolutely passionate about safari and conservation.

We believe that genuine hands-on expertise and experience are critical when building a quality safari.

Most of us have lived and worked in the countries where we operate, guiding safaris, building camps, driving trucks and running operations.

Our Safari Experts, the people who actually help guests to build trips, have an average of 12 years experience, some more than twenty years.

All of us have had our lives transformed by the remarkable wildlife, landscapes and cultures. There’s nothing we love more than sharing these things with our families, our friends and our guests.

We all love what we do and we love nothing more than meeting like-minded people.

our experienced, passionate and empathetic team

We have always believed in absolutely honest and open conversations. We are not trying to sell you something, we are trying to match you with the best possible options.

When you get in touch, you will be able to have a relaxed chat with a genuine expert, someone with serious first hand knowledge of the places you want to visit.

We need to learn about you, so please do feel free to let us know as much as you wish about yourself and your travel companions, your aspirations for the trip, your likes and dislikes. It is amazing how apparently inconsequential details can have a significant effect on the trip.

From there, between us, we should be able to quickly narrow down the enormous range of options into a more digestible selection of tailor-made sample trips and, ultimately, to the perfect trip.

our guests have become our friends

Your Safari Expert, the person who actually works with you to build your trip, will be extraordinarily experienced and knowledgeable.

They will be able to offer you precise and up-to-date information and advice on all the best locations, accommodation and activities.

We are the only people who regularly inspect and photograph all these places, as well as testing all the activities, so that we can help you make properly informed choices.

However, your Safari Expert will not bring with them the kind of arrogance that can sometimes accompany this extreme level of expertise. They will always be friendly, empathetic and easy-going, whilst at the same time being extremely accurate and efficient.

At no time will you feel like we are pressuring you. If we cannot find the perfect trip, then we should all decide not to proceed. We too are only interested in elegant outcomes.

open, empathetic expertise

A superb trip is one in which the finest and most appropriate ingredients are thoughtfully and elegantly combined, to make a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts.

We are able to include in your trip virtually any locations, lodges and activities from around 35 countries.

That said, many of our trips are constructed from a relatively limited set of ingredients. Over the years, we have learned which locations and lodges work best for our guests.

As our relationships with key suppliers have deepened over the decades, we have worked with them to pioneer new safari areas, developing new properties and testing out innovative experiences.

We should also mention that in our minds ‘best’ does not equate to ‘most expensive’, but to ‘most suitable’. A great guesthouse can easily trump a super-luxury lodge, it depends on you.

Whilst we will usually lean towards our more popular ingredients in our early sample trips, please do feel free to suggest other inclusions. Our process is ever-evolving and new suggestions are always welcome.

only the finest ingredients

The reliable delivery of a product as complicated and diverse as safari trips is a considerable challenge.

Over the decades, we have developed an extremely advanced safari building system, that enables us to easily create an almost limitless range of trips.

When you start chatting with one of our Safari Experts, they can very easily generate multiple sample trips for you to consider. The limit is not how many trip options we can generate, but how many you can sensibly consume. We often find ourselves holding back, for fear of overloading guests.

Even more importantly, the trips that we create with our system are inherently reliable, using components that have been tested in the real world thousands of times.

Our suppliers in each country, the ground-handers, transport companies, lodge owners and safari operators, are all familiar with our systems and know exactly what to deliver on the ground.

On most trips you won’t even need to refer to your paperwork, you simply glide through your trip, unimpeded by anything other than the sheer pleasure of exploration.

delivered with ease, accuracy and elegance

The cost of your trip will be determined simply by the ingredients that you choose to include.

In most locations, it is possible to build trips to suit an extraordinary range of budgets. It is not uncommon for a high-end trip to be three or four times the cost of a value option, even though they may be of the same duration and visit very similar locations.

Most of this difference is down to the enormous cost variance between lodges. By carefully matching you to the right accommodation options, we should be able to hit your target budget.

There’s a few other variables available to us. In some countries the prices vary greatly through the year. In some trips we are able to adjust the levels of guiding and other services.

Elements that are to some people absolutely essential, are needless fripperies to other people. Tuning to your preferences is a very natural part of the process.

you drive the budget

We have never been the kind of company that asks guests to provide glowing five star reviews. All of the feedback out there on the internet is spontaneous.

If you search for ‘ATR Safari’ on Google, you will find a link to our Guest Reviews in the information panel. Almost all of the entries there are glowing.

We try to include a couple of review snippets towards the bottom of each page of this website, but otherwise we let the public reviews speak for themselves.

If you ever feel that you might like to chat with one of our past guests, maybe someone who lives in your area, we can try to make that happen. So many of our guests are generous with their time and love to chat about their safari experiences as much as we do.

our wonderful guest reviews speak for themselves