Tipping on a Moremi safari

Who you will be tipping.

A safari camp is a small, layered team, and the custom follows the shape of it. Two habits cover nearly everyone: the people who look after you directly are thanked directly, and the team you never see shares one box.

Your guide comes first, and separately. You will spend more of the stay with them than with anyone else, every drive, every sighting, every question answered, and their tip is handed over personally rather than pooled.

The poler who takes you out in the mokoro is thanked directly too, on the days you go out with one, and in the same way: in hand, at the end.

Some camps here put a tracker on the vehicle beside the guide, some do not. Where yours does, the tracker is thanked separately, a little below the guide.

The camp staff, kitchen, housekeeping, the workshop, the team that kept the day running without being seen, share one pooled tip, usually through the camp's tip box.

Transfer drivers in Maun and porters at a hotel are thanked per service, in the moment: small notes, handed over with the bags. The pilot of your light aircraft is not tipped; it is not the custom, and nobody expects it.

Camp managers are not customarily tipped, the restaurant-owner logic, though nobody objects if one has rescued your trip. In Maun, a hotel porter is thanked with a small note, and a restaurant with about ten percent where service is not already on the bill; a larger table sometimes finds it added, so read the bill first.

Once, at the end.

Tips are given once, at the end of the stay, at each camp. Never per drive, never per day. Tipping by the activity puts your guide in the business of performing for the tipper, and puts every other guest in the vehicle in an impossible position.

On a trip that moves between camps the cycle simply repeats: thank each team as you leave them, at the airstrip or the morning you go.

Cash, envelopes, and the tip box.

Cash in hand covers most of it. Most camps keep a tip box for the shared staff tip, and whose share it covers varies: some boxes include the guides, most do not, and the room folder or the manager will say. Your guide, and anyone else who looked after you directly, is handed theirs personally, usually at the goodbye.

US dollars are what most guests carry and every camp welcomes; pula is welcome too, and small notes make everything easier. The single most useful piece of preparation is a supply of envelopes, one per person or team, named on the last evening, so nothing needs counting out at the vehicle.

Some camps can add a tip by card. Treat that as the exception it is: it blunts your ability to direct a tip to a particular person, not every camp offers it, and a card tip usually loses a little to fees on the way.

How much is enough.

These are ranges, not rules. Tipping here runs to comfortable norms, per guest and per day for the people you are with daily, per service for the brief encounters, stated as ranges because service varies and so do trips.

Your own satisfaction sets the point: inside the range for good, above it for the guide you will be telling stories about for years, below or beside it where service fell short. A tip that tracks the service is the whole point of the custom.

The money and the place.

Tips are a meaningful part of service income here, which is exactly why proportion matters. Over-tipping distorts as surely as under-tipping: it pulls earnings out of line with responsibility across a small local economy, and a camp hand out-earning a park ranger is the shape of the problem.

That is what the ranges are for. They are not stinginess, and they are not a ceiling on gratitude; they are calibration, so that generosity lands as thanks rather than as pressure.