Sayari Tano Tours & Safaris

Overall a very good experience, a serious company at a fair price.

Despite some issues, we felt they wanted to give us a great experience. The rating is 4 and not 5 because of the logistic stuff mentioned below. The safari in itself was amazing, although that would have probably been the case with other companies as well. To get the highest rating they would need to improve on planning and information disclosure.

The good:

+ The safari was incredible with sightings of the Big 5 and other breathtaking scenes.

+ Our guide Stanley was knowledgeable but not very talkative without us asking the questions. It felt like we grew on him and towards the latter part of the 5-day safari he elaborated a bit more on the topics. He also knew all the parks very well and collaborated with other cars to find the animals.

+ Airport pickup/drop and hotel accommodation before/after the trip was great.

The bad:

- When we came to the hotel (which was also the office of Sayari Tano) we found out they were going to change the order of the park visits and do them “backwards”. This was because we were grouping up with another couple (we had ordered group safari) and the other couple started 2 days before. This was fine for us even though the info came very late. We also asked to be compensated with a half day Masaai tour afterwards which we got. In hindsight, it would probably have been nicer to start with Lake Manyara rather than finish with it (because there are less visible animals there), but this was a very minor issue.

- When arriving at the first camp site, we found out by the sticker on the car that we were actually going with a company called “World Tours & Safaris”. Apparently, they cooperate with other companies but not to tell us this felt very strange.

- When on the actual safari, we stayed in some different camps than those on the itinerary, which didn’t really matter to us because we didn’t know any of them anyway, but again this type of behavior felt very unprofessional. When talking about it afterwards, the management said that the campsites just had different nicknames and that we stayed in the correct ones, but it turned out that this was not true. We probably just followed the itinerary of the other couple travelling together with us.

- Because the park fees are paid per 24 hours, it does create some difficulties for the companies logistically to arrange the “full days” as per itinerary if they need to deviate from the original itinerary plan. Because we needed to drop off the other couple travelling in our car, we lost half a day on day 4 (of 5). We talked with management about this afterwards and they tried to defend themselves, blame the driver as well as the government for charging such high park entry fees, but we ended up getting a 5% refund (after asking for 10%). Before you book, try to ask them to be very specific about time frames to avoid this.

- The chef cooked “western” food for us like pasta etc. The food wasn’t that great and especially the lunches were super dry and tasteless (crackers, white bread, banana etc.). It would have been nicer to have some more authentic food and some love put into it.

- Sleeping bags were not very clean (probably never washed) but this was a very minor issue.