Meektrails Safaris

Good 7 days tour with Meektrails with some room for improvement

We are experienced travellers in Africa, and this is our fourth safari destination. We had a good time in Kenya with Meektrails as we visited Amboseli NP, Lake Nakuru and Maasai Mara. Overall, Meektrails did well, we had good communication before our trip, our contact Eliud was very quick to reply, we had an experienced guide (Joseph) and they were punctual and professional. However, there were some small issues, many of which apply to most safari tour operators in Kenya. None of these issues, however, got in the way of the overall good experience.

Firstly - the car. We decided to save a bit of money and we went for a 4x4 minivan instead of the classic safari vehicle - Toyota Land Cruiser. We had done that before in Uganda without any issues and we were assured by Meektrails that their vans are new and in good condition. Well, our van broke on the first day, just 5 km after we departed. While this of course can always happen and there is never a guarantee that issues would not arise with any car, it was quite obvious that the van was not in the best condition and our guide was quite careful in driving it for the rest of the trip. Its important to say that they reacted quickly and another car picked us up (with other tourists) and we shared the car for our first day. Even though we had booked a private tour, sharing for a day was not an issue.

An important piece of advice we can give to any traveller is to make sure you have a clear understanding of how many National Park passes you have and for which days. Park fees in Kenya are especially expensive and safari operators usually play around with passes to make budget trips possible and of course have a better margin. We had some small misunderstandings with Meektrails on this point (on one of the days our programme included a game drive, but in practice, it wasn't because of a pass that Meektrails did not pay for). Overall I think it was a matter of misunderstanding and did not take a way of our experience, since on this day we had a long trip in any case.

What was a disappointment, however, is that we specifically requested that on the last day we do a game drive in Maasai Mara and our flight was very late in the evening - 01.30 after midnight. So we specifically paid for the park passes - a total of 200 USD for two people. Yet, both our guide and Meektrails themselves, on multiple occasions, told us that there was not much time for a game drive since we needed to have enough time to get to Nairobi. We insisted that there was more than enough time to get to the airport, and even if it takes 6-7 hours (which usually takes 5, especially on a Sunday), we could have a half-day drive. They didn't agree and it felt like they just wanted the trip to finish earlier, so we did not feel like arguing and our drive was only until 9:30. This felt like wasting 200 USD on park fees for a short game drive. In the end, we arrived in Nairobi at 17:00 (with several very long stops - we just felt that there is a lot of time to spare), or more than 8 hours before our flight.