Month: February 2009

Is Kenya Safe?

Is Kenya Safe?

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

As safe as Argentina or Hungary.

First-time safari travelers often refer to the U.S. State Department site for travel warnings, and then scared out of their wits, they call me.

But the U.S. State Department site is very much out of sync with the rest of the world’s analysis of Kenya’s safety for tourists, as it is for many other parts of the world, too. The much better traveler sites produced by the governments of Canada and Britain put Kenya in the much more realistic category shared by many, many countries, including Argentina and Hungary.

Traveling to East Africa is not as safe as a vacation to Disneyland, but it is likely as safe or safer than many other popular destinations in the world, and this is the message that is so deplorably eclipsed by the clearly political tincture of the U.S. State Department site.

Consider that yesterday’s travel warnings for February 25, 2009, included 28 countries, of which Kenya was one. But Egypt — where a tourist was killed and many more injured by a suicide bomber who walked into a tourist area of the Cairo bazaar this past Sunday — is not on the list. That was only four days ago! And in the past after much larger tourist killings in Egypt, the State Department still did not put Egypt on the list.

India is not on the U.S. State Department list. India had a devastating terrorist attack in one of its two main tourist cities, Mumbai, last November 26, and the attack lasted a horrifying three days. It was really more a war than an attack. 173 people were killed and more than 300 wounded, and many of these were foreign nationals. The main targets were luxury foreign tourist hotels, one of which was virtually obliterated.

Mexico isn’t on the U.S. State Department list. In fact, here’s the State Department’s message to college students traveling to Nogales this Spring Break:

Nogales/Sonora: Puerto Peñasco, a.k.a. “Rocky Point,” is located in northern Sonora, 60 miles from the U.S. border, and is accessible by car. The majority of accidents that occur at this Spring Break destination are caused by individuals driving under the influence of alcohol. Travelers should exercise particular caution on unpaved roads, especially in beach areas.

Last fall was the bloodiest time in Nogales’ long drug wars. The ongoing battles culminated in the assassination of a major police commander on November 1, with more than a day of heavy gun battles that injured scores of people, including several foreign nationals. Already this year, more than 3,000 innocents have been killed during gun battles in the border areas between the U.S and Mexico.

But according to our State Department, the greatest risk to college kids traveling now to Nogales is “driving under the influence of alcohol.”

The last real violence in Kenya was after the election in December, 2007. I wrote a lot about that, and though it was before I blogged, I have now post-dated all the broadcast emails into blogs. Just click to the left on the 2008 indexes. It includes daily reports and reports of my own trips to Nairobi during the conflict.

From January through June, 2008, we canceled or redirected 28 safaris that had planned to visit Kenya, and as I wrote in late February, that was probably an over reaction. By March, 2008, Kenya was completely peaceful.

When the violence began in December, 2007, there were 80,000 tourists in Kenya. These were mostly Europeans at its beaches. Half of all the tourists to Kenya never leave the beach. And half of those 80,000 stayed and did not alter their vacations. This was certainly a sad time for Kenya, and more than 1,000 people died in the violence. Not a single tourist was hurt.

Local violence, no matter how it is directed, does not make for a fun vacation, and that was the reason we altered all the safaris that had planned to go there in early 2008, even though I was never concerned for the safety of tourists, or of myself. The last terrorist incident in Kenya was in November, 2002, when terrorist blew up a beach hotel north of Mombasa frequented by Israelis. Thirteen people were killed and 80 injured. Almost three years later, on July 7, 2005, 52 people were killed and another 700 injured in… London. The “7-7″ attacks occurred during rush hour on the London public transport system, a clear and directed attack against westerners by Islamic terrorists.

Britain isn’t on anybody’s list.

I don’t think the story ends by adding up the deaths and destruction, even though those are the hard statistics and those statistics actually show Kenya rather risk-free when compared to Egypt, India, Mexico or …Britain. There is, of course, more to it. As many governments are quick to point out, their decision whether or not to issue a travel warning has to do not just with the actual risk of an incident, but how capable that government is of helping their nationals who might fall victim to it. Needless to say, Americans can be assisted much better if the incident is in Britain than Kenya.

But even with this important qualification, more realistic western governments like Britain and Canada don’t make the blatant (I believe, political) mistakes regarding countries like India and Egypt discussed above. And neither do they consign Kenya to the dustbin of 28 other worst terrorist countries, like America does. What’s behind this? Why does America come down so hard on Kenya?

It started with the Bush administration looking desperately for ways to vindicate 9-11. It looked backwards and found in 1998 true Al Qaeda terrorists who blew up the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in August. The Kenyans truly bungled the police action that followed that incident, having apprehended the principal suspect a few days after the incident, who then escaped and was never recaptured.

Just as the Bush administration exacerbated rather than diminished terrorism with its fool hardy war in Iraq, torture and rendition policies, it worsened the situation in Kenya and neighboring Somalia by a series of childish missteps.

At one point there were four separate travel warnings the Bush administration placed on Kenya. One was slapped on the country the day after Kenya refused to allow an American warship to dock at the port of Mombasa. Another was published the day after the Kenyan Speaker of the House tabled terrorism legislation written by the U.S. for Kenya, effectively killing it. The Speaker said at a press conference that the legislation promoted by the U.S. for Kenya “is worse than America’s own Patriot Act.” These two actions actually strengthened Kenya’s own internal security. But instead of support, the State Department collects Kenya with Burma and North Korea.

In December, 2007, someone “looking like an FBI agent” according to Nairobi’s Daily Nation newspaper, walked into the Hilton Hotel in Nairobi and shouted to everyone to leave, that the hotel was going to be blown up. That afternoon, another (fourth) travel warning was slapped on Kenya that warned of an imminent bombing of either the Hilton or Stanley Hotels. This was at the beginning of Kenya’s highest tourist season.

The next day, the British ambassador invited journalists to a press conference at the Stanley Hotel, and then to breakfast at the Hilton Hotel, where he put the record straight. A Somali was resisting deportation that day, and when being dragged onto the plane by Kenyan police, the miscreant shouted that the Hilton and Stanley hotels were going to be bombed. The British ambassador wanted to emphasize that was not reasonable intelligence.

Traveling anywhere outside a familiar world has changed substantially in the last generation; there is more risk. It would be fool hardy to suggest otherwise. The very acts we consider so routine when we go through airport security in Dubuque, Iowa, would seem draconian only 15 years ago if implemented at JFK. The world has changed, and with it, our need to reflect carefully on where we’ve been and where we want to go. There will be some who undertake this reflection and decide to stay home.

But for the American traveler who will not let the world situation dampen his thirst for seeing new things and discovering new cultures, and who wants a more balanced and complete assessment of tourism risk, I suggest other national sites than the U.S. Here are two good ones, but there are many more:

BRITAIN’s travel risk site places Kenya in the same list of countries that include India, Ecuador, Indonesia, Thailand and Turkey.

CANADA’s travel risk site gives Kenya a 2 out of 4 level of risk, placing it in the same category as India, Argentina and Hungary, among many others.

I’d like to leave you with a true story that shows how relative risk is to the international traveler.

The man who runs my transport in Nairobi is an old friend who I’ve been working with for more than 30 years. His eldest son came to the U.S. for college, and then as with so many Kenyans who are educated abroad, stayed here. He became engaged, and his wedding was scheduled for December, 2002.

It’s not easy for even the most well-off Kenyans to make arrangements and get visas to visit us in the United States, but this man’s family persisted through long lines and many hours and 17 of them finally made arrangements to come to the wedding. My wife and I agreed to host some of them.

I became somewhat perturbed by the end of the summer, 2002, because they hadn’t yet advised us of their travel arrangements. The wedding was to take place in Philadelphia, a wonderful venue, because it made visiting both New York and Washington rather easy. But by September, we still didn’t know their flight details, and my own calendar was getting tight.

Finally, an email came in the fall of 2002. In a lengthy apology for delaying us, and another lengthy thanks for all we had done and were offering to do, my man in Nairobi said he and the other men in the party who were coming over got together and decided that it “simply wasn’t safe to travel to America, now.” So they called off the biggest trip of their lives, forfeiting the considerable time and money it had taken them all to obtain visas. The son got married without his family, (although they all did come the next year).

9/11 was big around the world. It scared a Kenyan more than the embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998. It reminded him of the Oklahoma City Federal building blast, of Timothy McVay and the Atlanta Olympic killings, the World Trade Center and Columbine, and all of these made traveling to America in 2002 much more risky than staying home… in Kenya.

The world is different, now, than even 30 years ago: the 1985 Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking; the hijacking of TWA in Cairo in June, 1985; or the 1988 Pan Am disaster over Lockerbie. All of these unfortunate disasters preceded the Kenyan embassy bombing, and there were no fewer victims or less misery. It’s all quite relative. We must be more vigilant than before, but for those of us who will never extinguish our natural yearning to travel, we must also be measured and intelligent, something that right now, the U.S. travel site is not.

College or Safari?

College or Safari?

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Both! For Less!

Who could not have been inspired last night by President Obama’s budget address? It’s like we’ve been in the darkness for so long that the light at the end of the tunnel is blinding, and so exhilarating!

But one of my clients had Obama’s spirit before the rest of us knew it!

Jodi Eckenhoff is the mother of three daughters, a practicing physical therapist in the suburbs of Chicago. In a few weeks, I’ll be guiding Jody and her recently university graduated daughter, Alison, on my premier Great Migration Safari. Wow, now that’s some graduation present! you say with awe. Uh-huh, but there was a catch!

(As a parent whose children are now out in the real world on their own, I know how difficult it is to finance a child’s higher education. I had the fortune of children who managed to perform well enough to get some substantial financial assistance, but even so, my daughter went to Bryn Mawr, studied at the University of Cape Town, then got a law degree, and also following Obama’s spirits, now teaches junior high school!)

The average cost of a college education broke $30,000 in October, 2006, according to the College Board, a non-profit association of 4,500 schools, colleges and universities. The College Board, in fact, has a little web tool that lets you estimate the cost of higher education in different places in the country, by different degrees, etc:

How Much Does College Cost?

Today, that tool renders a private institution for 4 years around $37390, 4-year public (in-state): $18326. When you add text books and materials, pizza deliveries, other living costs, car repairs, bond money, trousers that allow 2.567″ of paisley boxer shorts to show, text messaging, keg deposits, it becomes substantially more. But there’s the rub, and Jody knows it well! The tool is fixed on determining a “four-year” education, and today, most kids take 5 years. That adds another hard $9350 in college costs, plus another year of incidental expenses. Guess what, that could equal the cost for TWO on my premier Great Migration Safari. So Jody gets to go, too!

That’s right, parents, Jody tells her daughters that if they get their degree in 4 years, they can choose a “big trip” that she’ll accompany them on! I promise to give homework to everybody!

I’m very grateful that Jody chose my safari, and kidding aside, I can’t think of a more educational trip than the GMS. The two-week experience, I hope, is as enlightening as a good school-room education strives to achieve over a much longer period of time.

Congratulations, Alison, and even more so, congratulations, Jody!

Visiting a Village

Visiting a Village

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Is not what you think.

Throughout the entire continent of Africa, there are so-called “traditional villages” that will welcome the visitor… for a fee.

In truth there very few traditional African societies left on the continent. In the southeast Sudan, in western Ethiopia, in the densest jungles of central Africa, on the border of Namibia and Angola, and in the more remote areas of the NCA and Serengeti, there are a few traditional societies although not even these are without modern conveniences like cell phones. This is a tiny, tiny fraction of the colorful and fascinating contemporary societies which visitors will experience on any trip into the African bush, and I am continually amazed that visitors to Africa expect to see instead the 1954 Encyclopedia Britannica Maasai boma.

It has been at least 30 years, and in most places much longer, since there were truly traditional societies available for the majority of tourists to experience.

In part this expectation is the result of many local operators promoting this fantasy. And that’s understandable. At an average of $20 a pop, a so-called traditional village can earn a rather nicely sum of money. And my experience has been that this money is often well used, and I praise Ngei every time I realize when one of my clients hands over a $20 bill to a “village” African, that they are not handing it to a local politician.

So what are these so-called “villages?”

I suppose the best way to describe them is as “Living History Sites.” We have a great living history site near my home near the Mississippi River: the Apple River Fort. This is where Chief Blackhawk attacked white settlers in 1832. Everyday (well that is, every day until Blagojevich raped the state history site budget) local enthusiasts would dress up in early settler clothing, churn butter, harvest chickens and talk to visitors about the imminent Indian attack. That’s what a visitor to Africa will see, today.

I remember recently accompanying under duress a group of my clients to a village in Samburu. I noticed immediately that the “villagers” were the waiters at our camp, having discarded their Chinese style silk light green waiter blouses and neat wrinkle-free nylon pants for some Maasai blankets and auto tire sandals. And, remarkably, they were even painted up in traditional ways. They had to have acted with incredible speed, because we had just finished breakfast. Anyway, I winked at the guide, who winked back.

We proceeded through the guided conversation of how the chief had 460 wives and 5,902 children, and let everyone go into a smoky little hut to see how wonderful it was to sleep next to a baby goat, and then finally it was ending as we approached the “blacksmith”. That struck me as rather interesting, since what I remembered was that the Samburu tribe actually didn’t have blacksmiths, but used the neighboring Boran tribe to forge their spears. Anyway, we watched this poor kid trying desperately to start a fire rubbing two twigs, together. He looked up at me and said woefully, “Zamani, Mzee, tuna kibiriti!” Roughly translated, “A long time ago, Mzee, we used matches!”

Anyway, everyone had a very good time and got very good pictures.

What is actually much more interesting is where these societies are right now. How that resourceful kid who handed me my perfectly cut melon then raced back to play act what he thought his ancestors used to do, helping his town earn a bit more money. Even more interesting, how agrarian societies are coping with an impending desert and climate change, how important and vital education is to every single one of them, the effects of brain drain, the breakdown of tribalism, the capacity for language manipulation and understanding that only these multi-multi-language societies are capable of achieving.

“Sheng” is an entirely new language being spoken by practically everyone under 25 in East Africa. Even the advertisements in the newspapers that are directed to young people are often written in Sheng. “Fanagalo” is another entirely new language spoken by the miners in South Africa. These new ways of communicating between multiple tribes with their own entirely different languages reflect the many amalgams of social life ways occurring in Africa, and it is truly astounding! The speed at which Africa emerged from a traditional way of life into the modern world has thrust peoples who were as different as Yoda and Romeo into the same tiny room, and in the blink of an eye, they’ve got to figure out ways not only of talking to one another, but of living and working together. That’s why there have been some rough times, like during elections. But as with Sheng and Fanagalo there are just as many if not more fascinating everyday aspects to these colorful societies in transition to modernity.

So enjoy the Living History Site, but don’t presume it’s more than that. And don’t ignore the really fascinating and exciting aspects to the true, contemporary cultures you are guaranteed to see.

Don’t Bring Gifts

Don’t Bring Gifts

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This is not the way to help.

One of the most frequent questions I get from clients preparing to go on safari is, What can I bring as a present?

My answer is, Nothing.

This blog is a more sensitive explanation of this, and it’s not as easy as the curt reply above might suggest. There are two basic reasons that I discourage arriving safari clients from attempting small acts of charity.

The first is that single acts of giving can be dangerously counter-productive, producing exactly the long-term effect it intends to alleviate.

I will never forget pulling out of a gas station at Karatu, just south of Ngorongoro Crater, with another company’s Landrover just ahead of us. No one was going very fast, because we were just starting out. But before we knew it, we had hit a young boy who had run onto the road in front of us, seemingly for no good reason. We really couldn’t figure it out, and fortunately, we were going so slowly that he didn’t seem to be hurt very much. In fact, he was screaming that we let him go as we tried to examine him for injuries.

The minute he pulled away from us, he ran back to where he had been hit, and scooped up several small paper wrapped hard candies. Candies, apparently, that someone in the car ahead of us had thrown carelessly out the window.

From that day on, I realized that it could be physically dangerous for clients to try to dispense anything at all. Had that traveler alternatively tried to hand it out to a small group of needy children who gather around the cars as they’re being filled with gas, he or she might have sustained the injury instead of the child! There is usually very little decorum among a group of kids in need. That presumption may have motived that traveler to throw the candy out the window as his car began to move away.

This happened years ago, but for me it was an epiphany. It provoked me to examine very carefully my long-held reluctance to assist clients with any charity whatever. It helped me put into focus an intuition which I believe is very, very correct.

A single instance of dispersing a gift can be not just miserly, but deadly. First, candy is about the worst thing you can give children who are under nourished. It destroys their already fragile GI system, it makes them even more hyper and irrational, and produces none of the expected “happiness” I presume clients want to achieve. Even a high energy granola bar might be bad, depending upon what that poor child has been eating and is capable of digesting. And if the two foregoing concerns don’t apply, then the kid certainly doesn’t need candy for the same reasons most kids don’t need candy.

But the more important point is that it really doesn’t matter if it’s candy or a Laptop. What I have tried to explain, over and over again, is that regardless of the contextual need – poverty, hunger, bad water, illiteracy – single acts of giving are usually more destructive than no giving at all. It can be dangerous to raise expectations that can change behavior. If a child in Karatu expects to get a bandana or tennis ball every so often from a tourist vehicle stopping to get gas, it is likely he will skip school to do so. And if he misses school, he won’t improve his station in life, and he will never emerge from his cycle of dependency.

The cycle of dependency is a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, it has morphed from the single incident of a child missing school in the hopes of getting a present, to entire Third World economies failing to plan properly as they expect packages of co-optive aid that never totally reaches their needs. Nobel Laureate, Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, puts it this way in an interview in Ode Magazine:

“What all these pop stars and politicians want is the usual recipe: charity. But charity is not the way to help people in need; it is not a healthy basis for a relationship between people. If you want to solve poverty, you have to put people in a position to build their own life…

“The approach [many take] to poverty is thwarted by our fixed convictions: Poor people are helpless, unhealthy, illiterate and thus stupid, they have nothing, they know nothing, we must take care of them, we must give them food… It is completely wrong to think like this. I am convinced that poor people are just as human as anyone else. They have just as much potential as anyone…”

So is there nothing that you can bring on your trip, to give as a present, to help?

No. The least damaging attempt which I tolerated for a few years was collections of school supplies that could be given to a school directly. But even that is probably a bad idea. What is so misunderstood, is that everything that a traveler might wish to give can have such extraordinary value in the bush, that it rarely gets used as it’s intended: Rather, it will be traded, and when in the hands of a child, generally traded for something that has more immediate value, like candy, or glue to sniff, or some other instantaneous gratification. A box of school supplies given out piecemeal to children is about as productive as sowing your garden from a hot air balloon.

And even more ironically, if it is used as intended and successfully so, then when it’s gone it’s considered indispensable! Even when accepted with gracious pomp from a responsible school official, it might still have a bad long-term effect. What happens once that box of supplies is used up? Often the answer is depressing. Not only the children, but the teachers as well, sit on their hands until a new box arrives. If it doesn’t, learning stops.

There is a second more philosophical, and perhaps more important reason. I go back to my old mentor, Herbert Marcuse, whose theory of co-optive liberation can be as exactly applied to this discussion as to macro social politics: Marcuse.org. With apologies for likely destroying his greater ideas with this reduction, let me try to summarize Marcuse in terms of a traveler coming to Africa who wants to give something away:

(1) The need the traveler presumes exists in Africa exists right at his home. Poverty, hunger, ignorance – most of us can find it pretty close to our residential address, certainly closer to us than Africa. Yes, it may exist to a greater extent in Africa, but certainly the small act of charity the traveler has in mind would have no greater impact in Africa than in the slum in the city nearest his home, right? So why wait for Africa to affect this generosity? Are the poor kids in Watts less needy than in Karatu?

(2) All the combined charity in the world has actually not stopped the slippage into greater poverty and hunger. It keeps getting worse. So all our combined efforts, individual and aggregate, aren’t working. The sums are documented in numerous places:
John Hopkins Univ.
Indiana Univ.
Boston College

So why do we continue? We do so, because it makes us feel good. Invariably I field the argument, “But at least it helped that one school for a day.” As I tried to point out above, you can’t reduce the problem to individual immediate incidents without compromising the more important long-term. It may have helped that school for the day, but it probably really hurt that school for the term. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to understand this. And yet there is this dogmatic individual certainty that giving is good in all cases. It is good, as Marcuse would point out, for ourselves, and by so doing it relieves us of the very natural human instinct to help one another. So we co-opt the visceral intuition to help, by doing something that in the larger perspective doesn’t help at all except to relieve ourselves of the feeling that we need to help.

(3) Basically, the problems we would like to solve have become so enormous that there is no hope of solving them through individual or even collective charity. When a remedy occurs, it will undoubtedly rely on individual initiative, but it will be overseen and vastly underwritten by governments to governments. Only governments are big enough to tackle these urgent problems. In 2007, total worldwide charity approached $400 billion. But the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a UN agency) has time and again affirmed its “10-15″ prescription necessary for making (only) black Africa self-sufficient: 10-15% of the developed world’s budget given as directed aid to Africa for 10-15 years. 10-15% of the developed world’s budget is at least 25-50 times total worldwide charity, and much of that world-wide charity would do nothing for black Africa. Africa is only part of the needy world. And this is a prescription that must continue for 10-15 years! Just for Africa!

Marcuse argues so well that individual initiative often co-opts that citizen’s necessary ascension to his government’s need to act. There’s a feeling – so deadly wrong and especially in America – that individuals, and not governments, are the answer.

People are beginning to realize this. One easy-read explanation is by Tim Harford, a Financial Times columnist, in his recent book, The Logic of Life (available at Amazon.com). I think, though, that a thumbnail sketch of his themes has been better reduced by Slate.com.

Charity, especially again in America, has become selfish, because it has been so personally internalized and individual. The world is just too complex. The tiny piece of candy you might wish to give a child in Africa, might just end up killing him. The box of school supplies you’d like to leave with the Headmaster may doom all 40 children in his class to poverty for the rest of their lives. Rather, help those in need at home and help your government work better so that it can help the world.

Are Prices Dropping?

Are Prices Dropping?

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It’s Too Little, Too Late.

Sitting here on Valentine’s Day, I am surrounded by oodles of unrequited love: for only $99 I’ve been offered 5 nights in Orlando including a public bus ticket; a 5-night cruise to Antigua for $230; 6 nights during the mud season in Budapest including roundtrip air on Malov airlines (from Lisbon) for only $399; a week in Cancun for $444 at a condo next to the pineapple factory; or free tickets to the winter ballparks of major leagues in Phoenix including a free $100 coupon for a Canadian drug company.

For my East Africa, it’s even more embarrassing, and this is for real. CCAfrica (who I refuse to call by their new name, “&beyond”) first offered 4 nights at any of their $1000 per night camps for only the price of three and now (!) offers 6 nights for the price of four, Governor’s Camps has extended the low season pricing into the high season as have many other companies, and mega-giant Abercrombie and Kent has announced that next week it will begin lowering the price of many of their East African products by 5% per hour until they reach 60% off or sell out.

Meanwhile, the Bernie Madof ponzi scheme has even hit my circuit. A silent American partner in Sangare Ranch in the Aberdare is listed by the New York District Attorney’s office as one of the effected investors, and on this complex is Sangare Tented Camp, an important part of Kenya’s northern circuit for tourists. Greed. Greed in pricing East African products, and then greed to use the ridiculous returns to get even more.

Doesn’t anybody get it? Heavy discounts are meaningless when the baseline product is so overpriced to begin with! According to the offers on my desk right now, I could go cruising the Caribbean on an all expense paid boat like Carnival, for SIX WEEKS(!) for the cost that CCAfrica is now discounting for six nights in Kenya. Good Lord, WAKE UP EAST AFRICA!

More importantly for us in African travel and tourism, we should be using this critical moment to restructure our entire idea of future business in East Africa, not just discounting what had become ridiculously overvalued to begin with.

Business models for East African tourism haven’t changed for 40 years. The ROI (Return on Investment) must be 100% in 3-4 years, and after that’s achieved, you do as little as possible to maintain the property or company in working order, making hay while the sun shine and hibernating in the cold season. This is a horrible model, but it was a rational one, because both the political and economic climate of a developing area is so volatile. So the risk when compared to building a Holiday Inn at the intersection of I94 and I80, is considerable, and if things looked promising and peaceful for the next three years, there was a glimmer of opportunity.

This model left us with some of the most decrepit buildings, bathrooms, 4x4s, restaurants, and yes even tourism welcome stations, ever conceived. And whenever a good 3-year period seemed to appear on the horizon, a thin veneer of repair was slapped over everything.

Most East African lodges and tented camps, and most of them in southern Africa, too, are probably overpriced by 100-150%. If structured into a more customary business model with a longer ROI and smaller annual return, they would cost that much less. And despite press reports as eager to claim Kenya is imploding as Obama is mistaken, East Africa is growing more and more mature financially and socially, and it’s time to realize that travelers are comparing an East African safari with a vacation most anywhere else. And when this type of comparison is made, the ridiculously high prices we have seen over the last few years come into clear perspective.

Time to rethink, East Africa. Time to use this otherwise awful catastrophe as an opportunity to realign ourselves with mature tourism business worldwide.

Preparing for Safari

Preparing for Safari

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You have to get ready sooner than you think!

The time and money that people invest in a major trip like an African safari is considerable, and yet I’m continually amazed at how poorly this investment is sometimes treated.

I’ve written before about the importance of keeping the investment whole by additional purchases such as good binoculars and proper clothing and gear; and of the importance of actually reading some of the things the companies send you, as well as learning a bit about the history, society and geography of the areas you’re going to visit.

But perhaps the greatest infraction comes just a few days before this great experience is to begin. It seems like the greater the experience, the more the traveler tries to compact his work and social schedule just before going. And the result is often packing the night before and racing onto the first plane just in the nick of time, dead tired from compounded work the week before.

This is a recipe for catastrophe.

Packing too soon before you’re scheduled to leave is symptomatic of a serious negligence of how much you’ve invested in this “great experience.” It means that you likely won’t have the right clothes or gear, because those are discoveries usually made when packing. You’ll probably discover that the carry-on isn’t considered a carry-on, anymore, and that you won’t get it through London customs. So you’ll end up checking both bags; they’ll then both be delayed, and you’ll end up with one set of clothes for 12 days. Even if you get the bags, you’ll probably have forgotten things like sun screen, so you’ll fry. You’ll have forgotten “little things,” like your digital camera and passport.

Packing for trips is actually an art. There are usually all sorts of restrictions on weight and size of what you can bring, and it’s not something you can expect to do at the last minute.

This trip is “so long” and “so important to you” and you’ve “spent so much money on this” that you’re going to try to make up for the extravagance before you go. You’ll work overtime at the office, clear the calendar by doubling up appointments the week or two before, go on a crash diet so that you don’t have to worry at the buffets, and basically run both your body and your mind down to a puddle.

Not very smart. Your immune system will be so run down that the moment you step onto that virus carrier, you’re doomed. Long airplane rides are as bad as lacerating yourself in a pig farm in Iowa in the summer. Planes are tubes of viruses. If you’re stressed out, tired and in poor physical or psychological condition, you’re going to succumb to colds and flu.

The science is terrifying. A consortium of seven universities has formed a project to filter the anecdotal into real science and the message is clear: the more stressed out you are before your big trip, the more likely you are to get sick on the trip.

No WebMD or collection of medications is going to help the sap who won’t help himself. No fool-hearty sleeping pill or DVT Christmas basket of gingers and amphetamines can replace simple common sense. Plan ahead. Begin your preparation a month before you go.

A MONTH BEFORE
Set aside a quiet hour or so every few days to re-read everything carefully about your trip. You might find something particularly interesting that a good book will enhance… if you have the time to buy the good book before you leave. You might have missed that reference to malaria medication. Maybe you missed the notification that it was going to be very cold, when you presumed it was always going to be hot. Passports, visas, health certificates, airline tickets… all ordered and in a safe place, right?

THREE WEEKS BEFORE
Complete all your household responsibilities: bills to be paid, post office notifications, extra keys, pet arrangements. Check your calendar to make sure you’ve not inadvertently scheduled something during the trip, and that you’re comfortable with what awaits you when you return home. Planning everything so well advance, you’ll now have time to start reading a few of the local newspapers from where you’re going, now on the internet.

TWO WEEKS BEFORE
Critical time, now. The most important thing of all is to check on your upcoming flights… in advance with a little twist. It should be rather simple to check on your actual flights. But note especially for international flying, that daily schedules are not as likely to reflect well how you’ll fly, as weekly schedules. So, for example, if you’re flying from San Francisco to London on a Thursday night, check out how that specific flight on the Thursday this week did. Not how it will do, but how it actually did. On time? Late? Cancelled? This will be a clue as to how easy, or hard, it’s going to be for you. If there’s a problem, call your ticketing agent to discuss the contingencies that apply… This is also the week you pack! Yes, pack! Your suitcase should be zipped up a week before you go, and you should take several days to do it, preferably at a casual time of your day, like after dinner, far from work.. Do it methodically: one night for clothing, one night for gear. With at least one weekend available before you leave, you’ll have time to remedy anything you’ve forgotten.

A WEEK TO GO
If you’ve followed this schedule, you’re ready to go right now if you had to. But this week is critical for not screwing up. If you’ve got a party or special meeting planned, go easy on the hors d’oeuvres. Forget about that third glass of wine. Take it easy. Eat less and drink less, keep yourself well hydrated, exercise a lot and get plenty of sleep. Getting your body limber and lean before that god awful flight will take you through it a lot easier.

POSTPONE THE PARTY
The airport and the plane are the two worst places to party. The temptations are great, to be sure. You’ve finally made it, with your zipped suitcase, and your guidebook and medications, and you’re on time! It’s not over yet, Charlie. Booze it up or eat too much on the plane, and you’re toast for the rest of the trip. So stay business-like, eat as little and drink even less alcohol, all the while keeping yourself massively hydrated.

Now, you’ll be just fine for that week in the Caribbean!

Beware TripAdvisor!

Beware TripAdvisor!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

TripAdvisor is no expert.

This title doesn’t mean not to use TripAdvisor and the many other similar sites. I mean exactly what I say, “Beware.”

Most of these sites are used by travelers who have visited some place less than a few times. The vast majority of posts are by persons who are reviewing some place after a single visit. If you decide to trust their subjectivity, consider how you might expect that same person to review your own home town at different times of the year, or coincidentally during the hurricane, or during the drought or just after the cops closed the neighborhood to look for the serial killer (the only crime you’ve had in generations).

That’s the first reason to “BEWARE.” Anecdotal reviews are just that. They are itsy-bitsy tiny impressions of a place that changes throughout the year, blossoms and dies, and is subject to all the same problems that beguile anywhere: politics, social changes like strikes or pay raises, unusual weather and so many other variables. But, you counter, what if I read a dozen reviews of the same places at different times of the year? Then you’re getting close to a more reasonable and true review. BUT

The second reason to “BEWARE” is that these are not anonymous reviews. They are reviews by people who want to review. Their motivation might be for the greater good, but that’s unlikely. They’re either so excited that they don’t know who to tell, or they don’t have anyone else to tell. Usually the people who post reviews are the least subjective of travelers. The motivation to post is driven more by ego than common good. They want everyone to know they had a good time (even if they didn’t) or they really want to stick it to some one or some place they feel did them a wrong. Without knowing the motivation for someone posting a review, BEWARE.

The third reason to “BEWARE” is that a traveling consumer is rarely the right person to review where consumers travel. That’s right. I’m saying that the user is not the expert. The expert is someone who knows all the lodges and hotels, all the places, so that a true perspective can be created. The expert is neither overwhelmed or disgusted when the consumer is. Moreover, the expert knows not only the greater lay of the land, but the history. Believe it or not, more than 90% of every traveler we’ve taken to East Africa in the last 35 years ranks the best place they visited as their first place on the trip. This reflects their enjoyment and excited at getting started and it isn’t a good review of that place. It’s a reflection of ego, not analysis.

The final and very important reason to “BEWARE” is that many, many of these reviews are simply dead-out wrong. The blanket statements I’ve read, for instance, about the rainy seasons, the cost, the politics and so much more, are often so inaccurate as to make me explode. There is no due diligence in much of what is written. I read one review on a site that said Crater Lodge is nice but has poor service because the Tanzanian company that owns it doesn’t pay its employees enough. Crater Lodge is owned by South Africans, not Tanzanians, and many travelers there get upset with the recommended tipping explained to them on arrival. That’s a separate issue. It might be wrong to recommend such high tipping, but it shouldn’t reflect back that the employees are paid poorly. As a matter of fact, they’re the most highly paid lodge employees in northern Tanzania. This was rather specific and easily explained away. But remarks about weather, society and politics, game viewing and cost, are usually so out of whack with the truth that it would be laughable were it not simply so untruthful.

I would make the broad generalization that as regards East Africa, most of the reviews on TripAdvisor are incorrect if not outright wrong and terribly misleading.

BEWARE, folks. Enjoy the read, but find an expert to help you out, too.

Closing Your Deal

Closing Your Deal

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Consumers, too, must be fair.

Recently we were enjoying a Saturday evening out with friends when the subject of their upcoming trip to Argentina came up. They know I’m a sub-Saharan mostly East African expert, not an Argentinian one, but they had already asked me to review their communications with the companies they had been working with for some general advice, and arrangements were moving to something final. So the question came up, “Should I ask them for a better deal?”

Asking for a better deal towards the end of an vendor-consumer relationship is a recipe for disaster. The consumer is asking the vendor to reduce his profit, since if the details are presumably fixed, there’s nothing else to reduce. The answer to my very good friend was, “No.”

The travel industry is sick. It’s as sick as the economy as a whole, because it doesn’t get adequately compensated. Except for the top executives of a few big airlines or hotel companies, travel industry employees are suffering terribly, and as a result, the products they produce, maintain and sell are deteriorating. This long-term illness is caused by consumers forcing increased productivity, which in travel means decreased unit profits.

It didn’t use to be that way. Anyone who has traveled for only 10 or 15 years may actually not have experienced the gilded age of travel. But those of us who were traveling 40 years ago are drowning in nostalgia.

Buying travel today is a mixture of a poker game and a stock market.

It’s pretty easy to determine the cost of most source travel products, and this is precisely because they’re pretty simple. An overnight at a BnB, a guide to take you fishing, joining others for a bus tour down the Champs Elysees – it’s not rocket science to add up all the things that make these work and then, add a reasonable profit. And for more complicated things, like a flight from JFK to Buenos Aires, that too in the scheme of worldwide business isn’t all that difficult. Sure, as things get more complicated, there are more variables (like fuel), but that’s exactly why airline prices fluctuate. Determining the net cost is pretty straight-forward.

That’s why the government was able to set prices so fairly until the 1980s. Yes, that’s right youngsters, there was no priceline back then! It was Big Daddy who figured out the cost of your airline ticket from Chicago to New York. And He was really very good at it. Airlines prospered, employees prospered, even the technology prospered so wonderfully and quickly that we even traveled to the moon! And back! That’s more than happens to many travelers’ Thanksgiving vacations these days.

And guess what? It was fun. And it was easy. And above all, it was fair.

What happened? Read Robert Reich’s excellent little cheat sheet, Supercapitalism. There are many references to travel. Deregulation was fast and scarey, and suddenly pricing was left entirely to the market. No longer did you add up bolts, paint, engines, and variables like fuel, and come up with a cost, because there was now a horrible new variable that never existed before, one that loomed above every sale – whether it was a big sale like an airplane ride or a small sale like a ticket to a play. It became such an important super component that it overshadowed all else. That new Super variable disallowed during the wonderful years of regulation was : “And so, how much are you’re willing to pay?”

Advantage, Consumer.

There are lots more consumers than there are crepes stands on the Boule Mich. And without any government to manage this interaction it grew really ugly. Prices tumbled. Fist fights broke out on rue St. Germain. (Well, I’m not exactly sure about that.) But competition was so intensified, so out of control, that suddenly our seats in the airplane began to shrink, our meals on tour began to look like they were on the wrong end of a telescope, and the people trying to “help” us on the phone were in the witness protection program and spoke perfect Urdu. We sit for 14 hours squashed into containers smaller than my guitar case, starve, miss many days of vacation trying to get there and back. Many times, we’re never really sure what we’ll be doing even after we’re on our way home. But, hell, did we get a good deal!

That’s the stock market of tourism. Bargaining down to nothing, with nobody to stop our self-destruction.

Do you know how many airlines and travel companies went bankrupt in the last 20 years, and are now doing business, again? More than not. Yet we still give them money. We still risk losing everything in order to get a better deal. In the late 1980s and early 1990s more than $200 million travel dollars was lost by consumers. Most of this was with big airlines like Eastern, Braniff and yes, United and Northwest. But there was also a lot of money lost with big tour companies like Hemphill Harris, Lindblad, Far & Wide; hotel chains and car companies like National. But, but.. but… you say, aren’t some of those companies still around? Yep. And you’re still giving them money. But boy, what a deal they give!

Oh, Big Daddy, where art thou?

That’s the poker game of tourism. Bluff till your out.

OK, so you’re still going to Argentina, and it’s unlikely Big Daddy will help us out before you’d like to tango. So what do you do, right now?

As the consumer, we’re mostly to blame for this mess, so it’s mostly up to us to play fair. Don’t start something implying you’re going to finish it, when you have little intention of doing so. Don’t tease a sale for information. Don’t broadcast your request to a dozen hotels or tour companies without letting them know that’s exactly what you’re doing. When 5 reply with an offer, thank them and let everyone that replied know exactly how you chose and at what price.

Way too often, today, consumers engage a travel supplier in a back-and-forth that they imply from the start is an exclusive relationship. Then, after weeks of fine tuning a vacation, and in the absence of any hanky panky, the consumer still remarks, “You know times are really hard. We’re not sure we can do this, now.” That’s terribly unfair. It’s an obvious ploy to “get a better deal.” And you know what’s going to happen?

You’re going to get a “better deal.” And all sorts of corners you never imagined existed will suddenly be clipped away. Without any way of you knowing, a great vacation idea will become a horror tale. But boy, what a great deal you’ll get!

Until Big Daddy comes to our rescue, as surely he must in travel as he must with Citibank and Ford, we’ve got to be civil, transparent and honest from the getgo. There’s nothing wrong with beginning a conversation with a vendor by with telling him outright that you’re “just starting” and most importantly, “you’re not the only one we’re asking.” This is the way to go when you know pretty much what you want to do.

And there’s also nothing wrong with vetting vendors, first, and then querying one exclusively. This is obviously the way to go when you aren’t so sure what you want to do. Instead of asking multiple vendors for a price, you spend your time and energy finding someone you decide you can trust to decide those things for you. This could be a travel agent, or a wholesaler, or an inbound operator, or your mother-in-law. But once you’ve vetted your vendor, trust him!

I’d say the vast, vast majority of travelers in the “old days” trusted Big Daddy, and it worked beautifully. I expect we’ll some day return to that model. But to recover that gilded age of travel, each and everyone of us travelers is going to have to contribute to the act of rebuilding trust with our vendors: transparency and bidding in the beginning; or a trusted, forged relationship from the start. You can’t have it both ways.