Only One Safaris was built on a simple belief: that a safari planned by people who have lived it produces something fundamentally different from one assembled from a catalogue.
Most safari operators start with inventory. A list of camps, a set of destinations, a pricing structure. They work outward from what they have to sell toward the client who might buy it.
We built Only One Safaris from the opposite direction. We started with the experience, with two decades of living inside the African safari industry, and worked backward toward what a client actually needs to have the kind of trip that changes something in them. The difference between those two starting points is the difference between a safari that is beautiful and a safari that is transformative. Both can use the same camps. Only one of them is designed around the person who takes it.
This page explains what we believe, why we believe it, and where those beliefs came from.
Neither of us came to this work through conventional routes. Mark Donnelly spent eight years progressing through the sports travel industry in England, becoming director of a specialist agency before a last-minute safari to Tanzania in 2004 changed the direction of his life entirely. Not a planned trip. Not a considered career move. An exhausted professional who needed to disconnect from everything, who found something in the Serengeti that he had not expected and could not explain, and who spent the next two years reorganising his entire life around it.
By 2006 he had left the UK, moved to the foothills of Kilimanjaro, and was building a safari operation from the ground up. Over the following fourteen years, that operation grew into one of the most respected in Tanzania, owning and operating camps in the Serengeti and Lake Natron, managing a luxury Kilimanjaro climbing operation, and handling the African logistics for leading tour operators from the US, Germany, and the Netherlands. Thousands of travellers. Every kind of safari. Every kind of guest.
Martina Hirschberg’s path began with a climb. She stood on the summit of Kilimanjaro in 2003, looked out over East Africa, and understood that this continent was going to be central to her professional life. By 2007 she had built her own specialist safari business, and over the following seventeen years she designed individual itineraries across twelve African countries, completing more than forty safaris of her own across the same terrain she plans for clients. Not to accumulate stamps but to keep the knowledge current, the relationships alive, and the understanding of what each destination feels like from the inside genuinely fresh.
We tell these stories not to impress. We tell them because they are the reason we understand our clients in a way that a company built on commission structures and booking platforms cannot. We have been where you are. We know what the exhaustion feels like. We know what it feels like when Africa answers it.
The safari industry has no shortage of operators who will send you a list of camps with star ratings and price tiers and call it a recommendation. Selection from a catalogue is not curation. It is administration.
Curation begins with a different question. Not “what camps are available in this destination in this window?” but “what does this specific traveller need from this specific trip, and which combination of experiences, guides, ecosystems, and pacing will deliver it?” Those are not questions a booking platform can answer. They are questions that require the kind of accumulated judgement that only comes from years of being on the ground, in the vehicles, at the camps, watching what happens to different kinds of people in different kinds of environments.
Mark has planned thousands of journeys. Martina has completed more than forty safaris of her own across the continent she plans for clients. Between us, we have a body of direct, specific, current knowledge about what works and what does not that is not available in any database. A camp that looks extraordinary in photographs but has recently changed its head guide. A conservancy that was overcrowded three years ago and has quietly become one of the finest game viewing areas in East Africa. A walking safari experience that suits a particular kind of traveller almost perfectly and leaves another kind feeling exposed and uncertain. These are the things that curation knows and selection does not.
Only One Safaris is a small operation by design. We limit the number of clients we work with at any time specifically to ensure that every safari gets the attention it requires. When you work with us, you work with us directly. Not a call centre, not a booking assistant, not a junior consultant who passes the file to someone more senior when things get complicated. The person who understands your brief is the person who builds your itinerary, maintains your booking, and is reachable when you are standing at an airstrip in the Okavango wondering where your transfer is.
That model does not scale the way a catalogue operation scales. It was never intended to. The safari experience we believe in, the one we have spent two decades building the knowledge to deliver, requires a level of personal attention that volume makes impossible. We are comfortable with that trade-off. Our clients, who are almost universally people who have had enough of being processed by large organisations, tend to find it is exactly what they were looking for.
Mark describes watching clients arrive and depart as the clearest measure of whether the work is being done well. The stressed, recently-arrived professional whose nervous system is still running at the pace of whatever they left behind. The same person four or five days later, with what he calls “eyes-sparkling” — a shift in presence that is visible and consistent and does not require any particular sighting or dramatic event to produce. Africa does this to people. The right safari, designed around the right person in the right moment, accelerates it.
That transformation is what Only One Safaris exists to produce. Not a beautiful trip. Not a successful logistics operation. The specific shift in a person that happens when they spend enough time in genuine wilderness, with genuine guidance, at a pace that allows the experience to land rather than pass through.
We have seen it happen thousands of times. We have never become indifferent to it.
We will not recommend a camp we have not vetted. We will not build an itinerary around what is available rather than what is right. We will not tell a client that their budget works for the experience they are imagining when it does not. We will not add destinations to an itinerary because more sounds like better value. We will not pretend that every African destination suits every kind of traveller, or that the right answer to every safari question is the most expensive one.
These are not policies written for a website. They are the practical conclusions of two decades of watching what produces extraordinary safaris and what produces expensive disappointments. The difference is almost never about money. It is almost always about honesty at the planning stage.
If you would like to work with a team that starts every conversation with what you actually need rather than what we happen to have available, get in touch with Only One Safaris.
We start with the traveller rather than the inventory. Most operators work from a catalogue of camps and destinations outward toward the client. We work from a detailed understanding of the specific person and their specific needs inward toward the right combination of destination, camp, guide, and pacing. The result is an itinerary designed around the trip you actually want rather than the trips we happen to have available to sell.
Martina has completed more than forty personal safaris across twelve African countries over thirty years. Mark has planned and operated thousands of journeys across East Africa since 2005, owning and running camps in the Serengeti and Lake Natron and managing the African logistics for major international tour operators. The knowledge we bring to client itineraries is current, direct, and specific to the destinations and camps we recommend.
Because the level of personal attention a genuinely well-designed safari requires is incompatible with volume. When you work with us you work with us directly, not with a booking assistant or a junior consultant. The person who understands your brief builds your itinerary and remains your contact throughout. That model does not scale the way a catalogue operation scales, and we have no intention of changing it.
We work across a range of budgets, but we will always tell you honestly what a given budget can and cannot deliver in a specific destination. Some destinations require a higher base spend to work properly. Others offer exceptional value across a wide range of budgets. Our job is to match your budget to the experience it can genuinely deliver, and to tell you clearly when it cannot deliver the experience you are imagining before you have committed to anything.
Yes. We recommend camps and operators based on direct knowledge and client feedback, not on commission structures that incentivise us toward particular properties. A camp that pays higher commission but delivers a weaker experience does not appear on our itineraries. The test for every recommendation is simple: would we send someone we care about here? If the answer is not an unqualified yes, it does not make the list.
Travellers who want a safari designed around them rather than assembled from available parts. People who value direct access to genuine expertise over the reassurance of a large brand name. Those who understand that the difference between a good safari and an extraordinary one is almost never about which camps appear on the itinerary, and almost always about who designed it and why. If that sounds like the kind of relationship you are looking for, we are probably the right fit.
