Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Bespoke Zanzibar is about structure: where the island fits in a trip, how many nights it actually wants, what to do with the half of it that is not a beach, and which kind of traveller belongs on which coast.

Zanzibar is almost always sold as an appendix — three or four nights of lying down at the end of a safari. That is a reasonable use of it and it is not the whole of it. Stone Town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a history of trade in cloves and in people that the town does not hide. Jozani forest holds a primate found nowhere else on earth. The northern reef is properly good. And a resort perimeter is remarkably effective at keeping all of it at a distance.

We also publish the two things the brochures skip. On much of the east coast the sea retreats several hundred metres at low water, leaving a shallow reef flat — interesting to walk across and not swimming, and a hotel photograph taken at high tide tells you nothing about the six hours either side. And the seaweed on those coasts is a significant local livelihood, largely run by women, rather than a maintenance failure.

There is one excursion we actively recommend against: the dolphin trips at Kizimkazi, which in practice frequently amount to boats pursuing a pod with swimmers put in front of animals trying to move away. We would rather lose that booking than arrange it.

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 Zanzibar guides, each going deeper on one subject than a single site could. This one is Bespoke Zanzibar: An island with a beach on it, rather than a beach with an island attached. These are the ones that sit closest to it:

• Luxury Zanzibar Beach — The beaches compared honestly: tide, seaweed season, and which coast works when.
• Zanzibar Luxury Hotels — The hotels, lodges and private villas, and the differences that actually change a stay.
• The Bespoke Safari — What bespoke actually means in safari planning — and, more usefully, what it does not.
• Luxury Safari Planner — Planning a luxury safari across East and Southern Africa: what the money actually buys, and how to spend it well.

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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