Tanzania luxury safari and beach vacation

Planet

The company that owns the camps featured on this itinerary was founded on the belief that to make a meaningful contribution to the conservation of wildlife, we must also take care of the needs of our people, making sure that it is them that feel the benefit from keeping wild places safe. In a normal season we put our safaris to work. We make use of our reach and logistics; planes, cars, camps and teams, to reach deep into some of the most remote parts of Tanzania with health and education outreach. We donate safaris to auctions to raise funds, all of the proceeds from our camp shops goes to our projects, and all of this is managed by a full time CSR Manager and supported by our camp teams.

Minimising our impact on our environment and on the wild places where we are fortunate to operate is of utmost importance to us, and is something we address constantly. The issue of plastic usage is a very important worldwide conversation at the moment, and rightly so. We are committed to reducing our single-plastic usage across all of our operations, and are working towards being single-use plastic free in the not too distant future.

So far we have banned single-use plastic from our cars and camps. From the moment we welcome a guest on safari with us, they are given a stainless steel water bottle, which they can then refill with filtered drinking water from glass dispensers in the main mess area of our camps. During game drives, we recycle wine bottles from our camps and fill them with filtered water for your time in the bush and ensuring the use of plastic bottles in our camps is non-existent. We have absolutely no straws in our camps, and have replaced cling film with re-usable containers to keep food fresh.

Back in the rooms, we provide our guests with amenities like shampoo, conditioner, and lotions. These are all stored in refillable aluminium bottles, and are all natural and organic – so very gentle on the fragile ecosystems where we operate.

Finally over in the camp kitchen, the team are working hard to reduce all plastic packaging used on items going into our camps. At the moment all veggie and dry goods are delivered to camp in cardboard boxes, wrapped in newspaper or brown paper. All the rice, sugar and flour are delivered in large hessian sacks and stored in air tight containers in the kitchen. The last remaining issue we have is the safe transportation and storage of meat, but we are looking at ways in which we can do this without needing to use vacuum packed plastic - watch this space.

People

The company operating the safari camps on this itinerary believe that as a local business with people at the heart of the operation, they must work to transform lives for the better.
Biashara means 'business' in Swahili and how we conduct our business in Tanzania is a huge part of what makes is the company it is today. From inception, our founders have always believed in investing in local communities and providing opportunities for both our staff, and the wider community. From the way our camps are built and where we source and purchase our interiors, to our micro-finance model that is unique within our industry, we wholeheartedly commit to making sure that the impact we have on the lives of people is transformative.

Sourcing locally, employing locally, training and up-skilling, and investing locally, these are the values that drive our business choices. In every arm of the company this is what we strive to achieve, and below are just a few examples of how we use our presence for good, making Tanzanian people our business.

Our unique guide micro-finance scheme
Our team of guides are a cornerstone to our company and many have been with us since our very early days. Our innovative micro finance scheme helps them raise funds so they can purchase and earn money from their own fully equipped 4WD safari vehicles.

Joining our founding families and pioneering some of the very first camps in our wild corners of Tanzania, this is not a journey we have travelled alone, and we are proud of how far we have come together with our guides. Knowing what an important role they play in our operations, we take care in keeping them in the heart of our business model and it is with them in mind that we developed our guide micro-finance scheme. Not only do we invest in up-skilling our fundis, cooks, and back-of-house staff when they want to train and become guides themselves, and you will be surprised how many of our guides started in the kitchen before we put them behind the wheel, but we have worked hard to develop a program and partnership with our guides that works for us both.

Our unique vehicle micro-finance program loans our guides funds to buy and equip their own safari vehicles. From then on every day our guides are on safari, they earn a daily rental rate for their vehicle as well as their guide fee. Nearly a decade on and we have now rolled the program out to all of our camp based guides in the South and West.

Our guides and their fleet of safari vehicles are iconic, not just for their company colours and individual vehicle designs and fittings, but every one is a representation of how we are working together with our people on the ground to make sure that we share in the profits of our hard work. Guides take great pride in maintaining their own cars (which is a bonus for us), and we are proud of how successful our vehicle micro-finance program has become. It is not long before loans are re-paid and guides are planning where to invest their extra income. Earning more, they are able to improve the lives of them and their families, but our guides are an industrious lot and they rarely stop there. When not out on safari, many of our guides are busy building houses to rent, opening mini-shops in their neighbourhood, and running small-businesses. We get great pleasure when things come full circle and some of these small-businesses even get drawn into our operations, supplying us with tools, fixing our cars, and operating transportation services to our camps. We already have a handful of guides who have saved up and purchased second and third safari vehicles, and during peak season when things get really busy, our guides are the first to be called upon for extra cars!