Ecological Friendly Hotels and Lodges

Wilderness Safaris

We prefer and recommend rurally based, ecologically friendly hotels/lodges/camps where at all possible. A good example of which is Pafuri Lodge in the Kruger National Park.

Typical of this type of responsible lodge operator is Wilderness Safaris who operate across Southern Africa and beyond to the Seychelles.

Wilderness Safaris recently won the prestigious Telegraph Travel award for Ethical Tourism which was collected by Colin Bell, the company's founder. Presenting the award Graham Boynton, Group Travel Editor, of the Telegraph said:

"Just before last summer's Live 8 concerts, I wrote an open letter to Sir Bob Geldof in Telegraph Travel, inviting him to come on safari with me. I wanted to show him how sensible, down-to-earth, ethical tourism was helping rural African communities help themselves: to feed themselves, to invest in schooling, to develop stable communities in hostile landscapes.

Had he come with me, I would have shown him, in particular, how a handful of dedicated tourism people in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park - actually there were five of them - were keeping the wildlife alive in the face of an extraordinary social, economic and political collapse.

Those five brave men work for Wilderness Safaris, a company that was formed around the time of the first Live Aid concert and which, for the past 20 years, has owned and managed lodges and run safaris all over southern Africa. Everywhere it operates, it makes invaluable contributions to African lives and African wildlife:

It pays local communities large sums of US dollars to have access to their territory and, in some cases, pays to discourage local tribes people from allowing hunters on to their land.

It trains and employs local rural people in tourism.

It creates jobs for local people wherever it has lodges and tourism concessions.

Every year its "Children in the Wild" programme introduces 1,000 disadvantaged inner-city children to the joys of the bushveld.