What Does Luxury Safari Look Like In Ten Years?

Of course, assuming we haven’t wiped ourselves and all the animals out by then.  Stay positive Tom, stay positive.

I was just in Jao Camp; truly wonderful lodge, thank you for asking.  And the fact that they built it in 2018 means it was being conceived of not far off a decade ago.  Building something ten years ago that still holds up against the competition and manages to wow should not be dismissed.  It’s a great achievement in foresight and quality.  But….it may also look extremely dated in another ten years, in which case this article will have aged truly badly.  But it’ll then get knocked down and rebuilt.  Most safari lodges barely make it out of their teenage years — 15 to 20 and they’re reborn.  I’m sure some of you reading have teenagers and wish the same were available to you.

It made me think.  And thinking is hard.  I wonder what safari lodges will look like in 10 years’ time.  And as we humans are historically terrible at predicting the future, here’s my failed attempt at what is changing.

Death to the Tent

Tents, with the rarest of exceptions, suck.  This battle has already been won.  The latest luxury safari lodges are no longer tents.  You can still find luxury tented accommodation, like Masiya’s Camp, but they’re absolutely taking the piss by calling themselves a tented camp.  Ultimately, it’s purely semantics cos it has a bit of a tented roof and nothing else in common; otherwise, it has as much in common with a tent as Simon Cowell’s face has with real skin.

Air conditioning has already won at the top end.  Underfloor heating is arriving.  Will soundproofing come?  Cos, even I can sometimes rather dislike being screamed at by a hippo until four in the morning.  Safari lodges now have hard walls, floor-to-ceiling glass, this wonderful thing called “comfort”.

Will we one day reminisce and feel like we’ve missed out?  I don’t think so.  I would sell my own mother for a heated floor.  I am not the solution here; I am the demand.

Rooms

Do we really need the rooms to get much bigger?  New, ultra-luxury lodges already have large, full-length terraces, separate living rooms, walk-through wardrobes, ridiculous-sized bathrooms and outdoor baths.  A lot even have two bathrooms now.  As solar and heat pumps have come down significantly in price, I’m awaiting heated pools to become standard.  Cos currently we have the great existential question of our age: what the fuck is the point of a plunge pool?  It should only be allowed to exist if it becomes a hot tub.  The plunge pool is currently a decorative puddle of misery that you get into once, for a photograph by a desperate influencer, and then never again.

Family rooms are rarer, so I suspect that will change – like at Tawana, with 8 rooms, and 3 of them are family rooms (essentially for 4 people).  Multi-generational is definitely a big thing since COVID, and more family rooms and more properties having an exclusive-use villa on or near the property will be the way forward.

The Villas

As for exclusive-use properties and villas, I really have no idea where this is going.  A cinema room, tennis court and squash court just feels a bit normal these days.  Indoor pools are coming; golf simulators; astronomy; more, larger wine cellars; padel courts.  It’s not even related to this, but I had a “horse therapy massage” earlier this year, where a horse walked around me as I had a treatment.  I’m not sure if we’re living in reality, but I am sure it’s a great timeline.

Look at that list again.  Gym, cinema, spa, pool, chef, padel court.  Every single addition is designed to make it unnecessary to go outside.  We are now capable of building a house so complete, in the middle of a private wildlife concession, that a family could spend a week in it and never once get in a vehicle.  And they’d rate the trip highly.

Just wait until someone develops some animal homing device that draws them over to the lodge.

Exclusivity

How long before the big parks, like the Mara, eat themselves?  More lodges, more people, more crowds, fewer animals (unsurprisingly, they don’t love being ringed by thirty Land Cruisers all day), and less of the wildness you came for.  The moment the illusion of an authentic experience dies, it’s over.  I’m already absolutely on the side of private concessions, but how much land is left to take private?  And when it runs out, will the concession camps just laugh all the way to the bank with ever-rising rates?  It’s what we’d all do…

The Sound Of Silence

Electric vehicles.  Cheetah Plains remains the only place I’ve ever been with one, and it took three years to habituate the animals to the silence.  Elephants, in particular, did not like being silently snuck up on.  But they got used to it in the end.  If every lodge started today, they’d still have seven years left to make this prediction come true.  And proving me right should definitely be part of their business plans.

I cannot express how prehistoric it sounds to be in a petrol vehicle, after being in an electric one.  The engine hum is loud, and you have to stop so frequently to turn it off and listen.

Will the entire industry manage electric in the next 10 years?  Probably not.  Maybe hybrid is more likely, but that will be a significant improvement.

Assisted Sightings

Thermal and night vision are now starting to show up at lodges, which is also pretty amazing.

Some purists will hate this.  I’m sure when cars came along for safari, they said it was awful.  Then radio ruined it.  At every stage, something new comes along in the tech space and undoubtedly changes the experience.  I’m somewhat in the middle of this.  I don’t want it to feel like a zoo, which in parts of South Africa it can, as often the predators are collared for conservation purposes.  On one hand, it means you can find them easier – there’s often a GPS ping sent once or twice a day, so you’ve got a good idea of where they are.  On the other hand, randomly driving around and then finding something is deeply satisfying.  But if I really wanted to see, for example, a wild dog hunt right now, I know Tswalu has them, and they know roughly where they are.  It’s Minority Report, except I’ve read the precog’s report, I know exactly where the crime is going to occur, and I have driven three hours to make absolutely sure nobody stops it.

As tech gets better, you’ll probably be able to track the animals in real time with satellites.

Drone On

Will drones happen?  No.  Do I desperately want them to?  Hells yeah.  They’re banned in national parks nearly everywhere and I can’t see that reversing, which is almost certainly correct and definitely boring.  Private concessions, however, are a different story.  Some already allow it, with supervision, which is the right way to do it.  So, I wonder if the rules will be relaxed more, so it’s possible, but with less bureaucracy.  For example, in Kenya you appear to need six years of study and a note from the Archbishop to fly a camera the size of a Big Mac.  Definitely make people get a drone license, but don’t make it impossible.

Spa Retreats

With the focus on multi-generational, you need to try and cater to those that are apparently dragged, kicking and screaming onto their once-in-a-lifetime, paradise trip.  And I ain’t talking about the kids.  Sometimes the older generation don’t wanna go out, so need that relaxation back at camp.  Kateka is already selling itself as a spa retreat meets safari, which is actually kind of funny, since their proposition isn’t even a strong one compared to what others are already offering.

Spas in safari lodges have gone from a treatment in your room to a simple little massage tent room.  Now, you’ve got saunas, steam rooms, hammams, and the first snow room is opening later this year.  You will soon be able to go on a world-class spa retreat, whilst there just happens to be a safari accessible too.

Always Connected

Internet on the vehicles.  I don’t agree with it; I don’t want it, but it’s coming.  If I didn’t have this inconvenient thing called work, I would want it nowhere near me.  It’s one of the things I enjoy about safari: being completely cut off.  Although, admittedly, not having access to the internet and always wondering if something awful is happening really bothers me.  When I fly with British Airways, I like their free Wi-Fi option for messages only.  It means I get emails and texts, but that’s all that works, and it stops me randomly wondering who that actor from that movie I saw 20 years ago was and what he’s been up to since.

Getting 4G/5G has become far more standard in parts of Africa already when on safari.  It’s fairly common in parts of South Africa, so it’s mostly already here, but places like the Okavango Delta have basically none.  I wonder if there will be a reverse of this, whereby some lodges market themselves as a premium disconnection destination.

Hands On

Cheetah walks have become normal in South Africa; I’ve now done it at three camps in the last year alone.  Gorilla trekking, where they literally come up and might touch you.  Meerkats, where they use you as a personal flagpole.  Where does it go?  Can’t wait to have my own Whalefall-in-an-orca-mouth moment.

I don’t know how far it goes before someone is killed and everyone goes “oh, it was so obvious”.  Hint: I’ll probably be the one killed.  But for now, it is an incredible experience to get so close to nature.

The Last Independent

Independents are in deep shit, without deep pockets.

It’s clear things are taking a turn, with Auberge, Ritz-Carlton, Banyan Tree, Aman and Anantara all having entered, or expanded, their presence in the safari market in the last year.  It’s going to make it very tough for independent properties to survive.  Not more so, when you understand in a lot of cases none of the lodges own the land, they are leasing it – sometimes from a community, sometimes government, sometimes a whole bunch of complex arrangements.  Understandably, the community wants what is best for them, and that means going to the highest bidder, and that bidder can be a large group that can easily absorb the losses.

These leases are for about 15-25 years, so that is often when the rebuilds kick in.  They build big at the start of a lease and rebuild when they renew.  And if they don’t expect to renew, they don’t rebuild.  Some of the tired camps I’ve walked into aren’t badly run; they’re on year twelve of a fifteen-year contract they know they’re going to lose.  If it were your rental that you were about to be kicked out of, it’d be the same.  It creates some unusual situations, one of which is happening in Botswana right now.

Because of horrible people like me, with all my demands of what luxury is, the cost of building new lodges goes up and up, the expectations increase, and the independents will only be those funded by extremely wealthy individuals who do it for the love of the game.

Somebody Has To Drive

I have found this an issue more and more in recent years: the quality of guiding is not what it once was.  And this isn’t old man shouting at the sky; this is due to the sheer scale of new lodges launching and the fact that you cannot magic up a guide with 20 years’ experience, just like you can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.  The top camps have these guides, but let’s take some of the rewilding in, say, Akagera, a place where they’ve had to put all the animals back, so it’s not like there’s a bunch of guides just ready to go.

The guide is already the most important person in your stay, but declining quality and the rise of new lodges will make them even more important.  I really believe the private guiding business is going to boom, and more camps will need even more guide rooms.  And staff retention will become even more important, with better staff villages.

And When The Music Stops

And my question: what happens to all of this when the music stops?  We live in times where we think there’s endless growth.  We are building, and building, and building, and every business plan assumes the line goes up forever.  Nothing works that way.

When fashion overreached and drowned itself in mass-produced tat, the correction was a significant collapse in sales and share prices.  But fashion makes a product; you can turn the factories down, you cannot turn down a lodge.  It sits there staffed, insured, maintained, its lease payment falling due whether a single guest arrives or not.  I look at COVID as the rehearsal of what happens in such times.

And if we’re endlessly building, when does it stop feeling real?  And that authenticity is the entire selling point.  Otherwise we may as well go back to zoos.

Conclusion

Ten years from now: hard walls, warm floors, cold air, hot pools, silent vehicles, thermal cameras, a full city-standard spa, and a wifi signal I’ll claim to hate.  Fewer owners.  A handful of camps gone entirely, for reasons written into a contract nobody read.

And somewhere in a magnificent glass-walled suite in the Okavango, in the year 2036, I will stand by my bed at eleven at night, pressing every one of the fourteen unlabelled switches on the wall in sequence, in the dark.   All that AI computing resource – surely it can solve the bloody light switches?