The same eight-day itinerary can cost three times as much depending on this one decision, and the parks, fees and driving are identical.
Mobile tented camp
Pitched for a season where the animals are, struck when they move on. This is how you wake up in the middle of the migration rather than two hours from it.
Inside: a real bed, a bucket or pressure shower filled on request, a safari toilet, paraffin lamps. You hear everything outside the canvas. For some people that is the entire point of coming; for others it is three sleepless nights.
Permanent tented camp
Canvas walls, a raised deck, and a proper plumbed bathroom. Same location year after year, so the mess tent and bar are more substantial. For most people this is the sweet spot — the sound of the bush with none of the real compromises.
Lodge
Built structures, rooms rather than tents, reliable power, hot water at any hour and usually a pool. Bigger, and therefore busier. The pool matters more than people expect in the flat middle of the day, particularly with children.
Budget camping
Dome tents at public campsites with a cook travelling with the group. Shared facilities, often cold showers. It is the cheapest honest way into the parks and it puts you on exactly the same game drives as everybody else.
The thing that matters more than the category
Location. A mid-range camp inside the park beats a luxury lodge an hour outside the gate, every time, because the gate lodge costs you the first and last hour of light — which is when animals move.
Questions worth asking about any property
- Is it inside the park or outside the gate?
- Is there power overnight, or does the generator go off after dinner?
- Is it fenced? Most bush camps are not, and you are escorted after dark.
- How many tents or rooms? Twelve is intimate; sixty is a hotel.
- Are meals communal or separate tables?
Mixing
The best-value trips usually mix. Camp or mid-range in the cheaper parks, then spend the difference on somewhere good inside the Serengeti for the nights that matter most.
