As a tour company, we have the great privilege and responsibility to decide what is best for our journeys. While on tour with us, you will not just see the famous destinations of East Africa, only. We put attention to detail and make sure, that your experience in Uganda, Rwanda, or the DR Congo is enriched by being part of the daily life in East Africa. This is when you will gain access to the real people of the region – the Mukiiga, Lango, Batwa, Acholis and Binyarwanda. We strongly support local products. This is not limited to crafts, only. Local services, local garments, and local cuisine brought to you directly from the fields of the region are part of every excursion we go on. Even our staff wear uniforms made of Ugandan cotton! Our brochures, environment friendly stickers, and our business cards are all printed in Kampala and not imported from abroad. The cars we use on our tours are hired when we need them. That way, we make sure, that we do not pollute the environment more than we have to while transporting our guests. Instinct Safaris, in close collaboration with the very people we meet during our tours, wants to promote the highly diverse cultures of the Great Lakes region and its overall heritage to you and the world. At the beginning of each trip and in preparation for a trip when you are still in your home country, Instinct Safaris provides you with updates on politics and news from the region you are about to explore. In order to help fulfill our visions, we support local development projects, which have been designed with the locals and different NGO‘s through the Instinct Safaris Foundation (ISF).
Instinct Safaris Limited is a fully registered Ugandan company. We are adhering to international environmental conventions, the local rules, regulations, and taxation policies. In general, we do the same as all the other tour companies which are in place, we conduct tours and travel in the Great Lakes Region. However, we try hard to always do it better than anybody else in the business. Instinct Safaris was founded with the goal to offer a better safari experience: at a fair price, huge involvement of the visited communities, and in an eco-friendly way. We commit ourselves to the highest standards in the business and always keep improving our services. All of our team members were born or raised in the unreal beautiful environment of Bwindi Forest and its surroundings or have spent a considerable amount of time working there. We also have Batwa (pygmy) team members in our group not only because they are experts on forest wildlife and flora but also because Instinct Safaris supports ethnic minorities wherever possible. We do not hire foreign guides or staff members. In fact, Niels is the only staff member who is not from the Kigezi region. However, he has spent a long time in the village of Rubuguri working on community hiking trails and gorilla tracking and is now involved with marketing for us. All of our guides have obtained a proper license in guiding and driving from the relevant authorities in Uganda, Rwanda, and DR Congo. Some of them have specialized in birding, which is an exciting activity to do in and around Bwindi National Park with its more than 210 bird species. By hiring local staff only, we can ensure, that on every tour of ours, our ideas can be embodied and carried on to our guests and they can enjoy our sense of and lifelong knowledge about our home region. After all, we design our tours in a way, that it is not guided by one guide only. Instead, we want to create a relationship between our guests and the people here so that the locals can become guides for a day and be ambassadors of their heritage.
Our safaris are carried out in a way which is environmentally sensitive and as environmentally friendly as possible. When entering the national parks on our safaris, we take good care of where we go. We do not litter the environment, we respect the environment and the rules of the UWA (Uganda Wildlife Authority) in Uganda and the corresponding authorities in the neighbouring countries. We try to use solar power whenever possible, e.g. for charging of phones and flashlights, and we save fuel when the situation allows. After your long flight to the Pearl of Africa, we want to keep our carbon footprints low and take responsibility for what we do.
We put attention to where we accommodate our guests during the budget, mid range and luxury trips. We prefer locally run hotels over internationally owned businesses. We try to point out guesthouses which have a positive impact on their direct surroundings as in conservation of wildlife and flora as well as their relationship to the local community. We as Instinct Safaris want to contribute to a rise of the income level of the many families who live in close proximity of the highly visited National Parks but are in poverty.
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