Perfect insider’s knowledge of all things Kenyan as well as personal attention and care

I had left Tanzania disheartened. My Tanzanian tour operator had been anything but service-oriented on the tour to the Serengeti and Ngorongoro the days before and the stay in Arusha had been very difficult. So upon arriving in Nairobi, I actually wondered why on earth I should do more African safaris. Wouldn’t all the tour operators be the same anyways?

But since I still had some days to kill in Kenya, didn’t want to pay to change my ticket, and was after all interested in wildlife while knowing that I might never again get a chance to see Africa, I decided to give OTA a go. I had been in touch with Tracey (there are countless tour operators/agencies in East Africa and you can’t write to them all but I found OTA on some responsible tourism website and, being an Ecotourism graduate, this appealed to me so I only wrote to companies listed there) and I was amazed at the amount of information she put down and also the passion that shined through. These were not the short almost copy-paste response that you might expect from a larger operator. So even if my money was about to run out, I decided to forget about it and asked Tracey if they could take me to Samburu and Tsavo West.

I can say that Tracey and Francis repaired a lot of what the Tanzanian operator had damaged. Had I not met them, I would have left Africa totally disappointed and totally disillusioned. But the two of them are just a perfect mix. Francis is a born-and-bred Kenyan whose insight into and knowledge of his country is amazing. There was not a question that he could not answer. These were also the weeks leading up to the presidential elections. Francis presented me with some very interesting views on how things might turn out and how things have been. He is also a very balanced man and a confident driver (the traffic in East Africa is horrible but Francis made me comfortable). Australia-born Tracey then offers a foreigner’s view of Kenya and is almost too keen to help out and give you honest advise.

My three weeks in East Africa were difficult as I had never been to Africa before and I learnt many things the hard way. But it would have been a much harder experience if not for Tracey and Francis. They are starting the company and will provide you with what many larger and older tour operators will not: personal attention and care.

Give them a go, you won’t regret it!