About Us
Meet The Only One Safaris Team
Meet the people behind Only One Safaris. Two decades of on-the-ground experience across East and Southern Africa, built by people who came to this work the hard way.
Meet The Team
Meet The Only One Safaris Team
The people who plan your safari matter more than almost any other variable in the experience. Not because they choose the camps, though that matters. Because they understand the difference between a safari that is beautiful and a safari that is right for the specific person taking it. That understanding does not come from training courses or destination databases. It comes from years on the ground, in the vehicles, at the camps, and from having taken the journey yourself enough times to know what it does to people.
Only One Safaris is built around two people who came to this work through Africa rather than toward it. Their stories are not brochure stories. They are the reason the company exists and the reason the safaris it designs are different from what a catalogue operation produces.
CEO and founder of Only One Safaris.
Mark Donnelly
Mark did not plan to spend his life in Africa. In 1996 he joined the travel industry in Manchester and over eight years built a career in specialist sports travel, eventually becoming director of one of the UK’s leading agencies in that space. He was good at it. He was also, by 2004, thoroughly exhausted by it.
In June 2004 he travelled to Tanzania. It was not a safari trip. The safari was almost an afterthought, a short add-on to a broader journey. Within two hours of his first game drive he understood that something had shifted in a way he could not immediately explain and could not ignore. The sheer scale of the Serengeti landscape, the density of the wildlife, the feeling of being inside an ecosystem that operated entirely without reference to anything he had spent the previous eight years caring about, produced something he later described simply as the first time in years that his nervous system had genuinely exhaled.
By March 2005 he had set up a safari and mountain climbing operation on the foothills of Kilimanjaro. By June 2006 he had left the UK entirely, moved to Tanzania and was building what would become one of the most respected safari operations in East Africa. Over the following fourteen years, the business grew to own and operate camps in the Serengeti and Lake Natron, run a luxury Kilimanjaro climbing programme, manage a fleet of safari vehicles with trained driver-guides, and handle the African logistics for leading tour operators from the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. He planned thousands of journeys. He watched thousands of clients arrive stressed and leave transformed. He learned, specifically and in detail, what produces the second outcome and what produces the first.
When 2020 changed the world and the business, Mark moved to the Kenyan coast. The quiet period that followed became a period of reading, thinking, walking, and deciding what to do with two decades of accumulated knowledge. The answer was Only One Safaris: a vehicle not for serving large tour operators at scale, but for serving individual travellers who wanted the benefit of that knowledge applied directly and personally to their specific journey.
Mark now lives quietly and describes his life as built around good exercise, good food and wine, and the ongoing pleasure of sharing what he knows with people who are ready to receive it. His particular expertise lies in East Africa, specifically Tanzania and Kenya, where his relationships with guides, operators, and conservation partners span two decades of direct collaboration.
Martina Hirschberg
Martina Hirschberg
Southern and East Africa specialist in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Namibia, and beyond.
Martina’s relationship with Africa began at altitude. In 2003 she stood on the summit of Kilimanjaro and looked out over a continent she already knew she wanted to understand more deeply. The climb was the beginning. What came after was a career built around the deliberate accumulation of on-the-ground knowledge across a continent that most operators claim to know and very few actually do.
By 2007 she had established her own specialist safari business, designing individual itineraries across East and Southern Africa. Over the following seventeen years she worked across multiple countries countries: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Namibia. She did not do this from a desk. She completed more than forty personal safaris across the same terrain she plans for clients, not to accumulate credentials but to keep her knowledge genuinely current. A camp recommended on the basis of a visit three years ago is a camp whose current guide quality, seasonal conditions, and operational standards are unknown. Martina’s approach to her own travel is the practical solution to that problem.
Her particular depth of knowledge lies in Southern Africa, where she has developed expertise in the ecosystems, operators, and camp philosophies of Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, and South Africa that few specialists outside those countries can match. She describes her Africa not as a destination but as a collection of experiences that she returns to repeatedly and finds different each time: walking over dust-dry red earth, driving over bumpy tracks in a four-wheel drive vehicle, flying into remote areas in small bush aircraft, canoeing on meandering river channels, and tracking wild animals on foot in company that knows exactly what it is doing.
The safaris Martina designs are tailor-made in the genuine sense of the word. She designs according to the taste and specific circumstances of the traveller, not according to which itineraries are easiest to assemble or most profitable to deliver. Her clients benefit from close, transparent relationships with local partners built over nearly two decades, and from a depth of personal experience across the destinations she recommends that is simply not available from operators who have not spent the time in the field that she has.
The Wider Network
The Wider Network
Beyond Mark and Martina, Only One Safaris works with an extensive network of guides, camp managers, conservancy teams, and experience providers across East and Southern Africa. These are not contracted suppliers. They are people with whom genuine professional relationships have been built over years, whose standards are known personally rather than assessed through third-party reviews, and whose commitment to delivering the finest possible version of their country and their landscape is something Mark and Martina have observed directly rather than assumed.
When you travel with Only One Safaris, the people you meet in the bush, your guides, your trackers, the camp staff who know your name by the second morning, are part of a network that has been built with the same attention to quality that goes into every other element of the itinerary. They are, in many ways, the most important part of it.
How We Work
How Only One Safaris Works With Clients
Every client conversation begins the same way. Not with a destination list or a pricing matrix, but with questions about the person. Who is travelling. What they are coming from. What they need the trip to do for them. What kind of pace, what kind of landscape, what kind of guiding relationship will produce the experience they are after. From that conversation, everything else follows.
Mark and Martina handle their own client relationships directly. There is no handoff to a junior consultant or a booking department. The person who understands your brief is the person who builds your itinerary, maintains your booking, and is reachable throughout your trip. That level of personal continuity is not a premium feature. It is the only way we know how to do this properly.
If you would like to start a conversation about your safari, get in touch directly. You will hear back from one of us personally.
Common Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Who will I actually be working with at Only One Safaris?
Either Mark or Martina directly, from the first conversation through to your return. There is no handoff to a junior consultant or a call centre. The person who understands your brief builds your itinerary and remains your point of contact throughout the trip. That continuity is deliberate and non-negotiable.
How much direct experience does the Only One Safaris team have in Africa?
Mark has been operating on the ground in East Africa since 2005, owning and running camps in Tanzania, managing thousands of client journeys, and building direct relationships with guides and operators across Kenya and Tanzania over nearly twenty years. Martina has been designing individual safaris across twelve African countries since 2007 and has completed more than forty personal safaris across East and Southern Africa over thirty years. Between them, the direct on-the-ground knowledge they bring to each itinerary is among the deepest available from any boutique operator.
Does Only One Safaris specialise in specific destinations?
Mark’s deepest expertise is in East Africa, particularly Tanzania and Kenya, where his operator relationships and ground-level knowledge span two decades. Martina’s particular depth lies in Southern Africa, including Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, and South Africa, alongside strong East Africa knowledge built across thirty years of personal travel. Together they cover the full range of Africa’s major safari destinations with direct expertise rather than delegated knowledge.
How does Only One Safaris vet the camps and operators it recommends?
Through direct experience and ongoing relationships rather than through third-party review platforms. A camp recommended by Only One Safaris has been visited, assessed, and in most cases repeatedly used over years of client placements. Guide quality, operational standards, conservation practices, and the specific character of the experience are known personally rather than assumed from photographs and ratings. When something changes at a property, our network tells us before it affects a client booking.
What happens if something goes wrong during my safari?
You have direct access to Mark or Martina throughout your trip. We maintain relationships with the operators and camp managers in your itinerary and can intervene directly if something is not as it should be. For medical emergencies and evacuation situations, we work with clients in advance to ensure appropriate insurance cover is in place and regional evacuation services are understood. We are working on a dedicated page covering our full guest support and guarantee structure, which will be available shortly.
Is Only One Safaris a large company?
No, deliberately. We limit the number of clients we work with at any time to ensure every safari receives the attention it requires. The boutique model is not a constraint we are working around. It is the point. A safari designed with genuine personal attention by people with deep direct knowledge of what they are recommending produces a different result from one processed through a large organisation’s systems, and we believe that difference is worth more than scale.