65+ years of age | Experience level: first safari
Richard is a professional, kind, and bring us to see all big five and other animals. Thank you!
It is professional, has kind staff, help tourists to know the entire excellent trip. It provides good quality to the tourists. Thank you!
35-50 years of age | Experience level: first safari
I highly recommend MoAfrika Tours!
I did the 4 day MoAfrika Ivory Moon Lodge tour and this was excellent! Ivory Moon is quite a small intimate accommodation, great for guests who want to socialise with other tour group members, as you all get to eat together. The food is also amazing and the staff are wonderful. I also stayed at the Radisson, and this tour is almost the same, as you join the same group 4x4's later, but this is good for those who want time to themselves and a less social setting. The 4 day tour I think is a great and suffice amount of time for the area and a great balance of a sunrise and sunset game tours, Kruger NP and the amazing views from the panorama tour. I highly recommend MoAfrika tours, they are punctual, seamless, well organised and the tour guides are fun and very knowledgeable.
JP
20-35 years of age | Experience level: first safari
Not only with great wilderness, but it was so warm people.
This is my first time to visit Africa and glad that I chose Tanzania as my first destination. I went on a five days Safari and one day hiking trip to Kilimanjaro Mountain. Both experience are very different from other travelling memories. I highly recommend whoever want to experience significant nature to visit Tanzania.
IT
35-50 years of age | Experience level: first safari
recommended
the safari was very good, our guide Papa Johns was friendly and professional, we went to Masai Mara and lake Nakuru, and we enjoyed both, accomodation and food were good at both locations, nothing to complain
20-35 years of age | Experience level: first safari
good value, solid option for solo or small group travelers looking for a social safari experience
I had a good overall experience with Sacred Wilderness Expedition company in Tanzania and would recommend them, especially for travelers who don’t want to pay for a fully private safari.
Communication before and during the trip was smooth and straightforward, mainly via WhatsApp, which made planning very easy. They offered a lot of flexibility when it came to trip duration, routes, parks to visit, and accommodation options across different price ranges. They also helped arrange transport directly from the airport to the start of the safari, which was very convenient.
The safari jeeps themselves were okay—functional but not top-tier, as I’ve seen better elsewhere. That said, the guides were solid: good drivers, experienced at finding good animal-viewing spots, and very patient when answering questions. They clearly knew the parks well and made an effort to ensure everyone had good sightings.
Food was quite decent considering it was cooked at the campsite, and overall well prepared. However, there could have been more protein—there wasn’t really enough meat for the size of the group.
One thing to be aware of is that this is a shared, non-private safari. Groups are international, which is actually a big plus and made the experience more fun—you get to meet people from many different countries. However, because of different route options, groups can be mixed along the way. You may not stay in the same jeep or with the same people for the entire trip, and accommodations may vary as well. If it’s important to you to stay in one vehicle the whole time, make sure to clearly specify your group size and preferences in advance.
Overall, this company offers good value for money and is a solid option for solo or small group travelers looking for a social safari experience without the cost of a private tour.
20-35 years of age | Experience level: first safari
Most incredible experience!
We had the most incredible 5 day safari over the Christmas period across the Serengeti, Ngorongoro, Lake Manyara & Tarangire. Our guide David was amazing, very knowledgeable and respectful of the animals. We were very conscious that our safari that felt ethical and kind towards the animals, and David was the right guy for this. He went above and beyond throughout the trip to make our time really memorable and special!
The months spent planning the safari beforehand were made very easy thanks to Rehema. Every request and amendment was taken on board, and we really had the perfect itinerary with some really beautiful lodges.
IT
20-35 years of age | Experience level: first safari
A Safari experience that exceeded all expectations
Everything was very well organized, from the detailed quotation to the fast and clear communication and the program was followed precisely.
Our guide Samuel was an excellent driver and a very attentive guide and, thanks to him, we were able to see a large number of animals.
Overall, a perfectly organized safari that we highly recommend.
65+ years of age | Experience level: over 5 safaris
Cannot Be Trusted At All
If you are seriously considering booking any tour with Madagascar Natural Tours, I would strongly recommend that you read this review before you do so.
We booked a 15-day birdwatching tour with Madagascar Natural Tours and started the booking process 9 months in advance.
On the Madagascar Natural Tours website, it showed all of what we were promised would be included in our tour, and Harilala,who is the owner of Madagascar Natural tours, confirmed all of the details.
However virtually every significant aspect of our tour that was promised to us was not provided to us,
We were promised and paid for a 15-day tour but we received only a 13- day tour. We had booked our flights to Madagascar about 6 months before our tour was scheduled to start. Then,one day prior to our scheduled flight to Madagascar, we received an urgent email stating that our flight had been canceled for safety reasons because of civil unrest and violent protests that were taking place in Madagascar. The airline also stated that they were not sure when they would resume flights. I contacted Harilala about this, and he assured me that it was still safe to come to Madagascar for our tour because we were not going to be in the places where the violent protests were taking place. I told him that most airlines had stopped flying to Madagascar and that the government of Madagascar had instituted night-time curfews so that only flights arriving in daytime hours could still land in Madagascar. I told him that I would look to see if there was any way we could still find a flight to Madagascar. Harilala told me to let him know if we could find a suitable flight and then he would try to change the hotel arrangements to reflect the new dates of arrival at each hotel. We were able to find a flight onEthiopian Airlines that would arrive a day and a half later than our original arrival flight and would arrive in the late afternoon. I gave this information to Harilala and he said he would check with all the hotels to make the changes necessary because our tour would be starting on a later date that was originally planned. I checked with Harilala on the following day and he told me that he had successfully changed all the booking dates for all of the hotels for all 15 days of our tour.
Then when we arrived at the Madagascar airport, we were met by someone who worked for Harilala and rushed to a vehicle, Then Harilala showed up briefly to introduce us to a driver who did not speak English and also to a supposed “full-time qualified birding guide”about whom Harilala told us was not really a birding guide, but that he would be with us anyway.Harilala then told us he had something else to do and ran off.
We then discovered that Harilala had not rescheduled any of our itinerary and hotel arrangements like he had told us he had done. He had decided on his own, without telling us or providing any explanation, that we were now starting on Day 3 of our tour itinerary instead of Day 1of our itinerary, Harilala had unilaterally eliminated the first 2 days of our 15-day tour without any advance notice or explanation, and without any recourse. This resulted in him taking away 2 days of our tour during which we would no longer have the opportunity to see the cultural and scenery sights, the birds and other wildlife that we had wanted to see.
We had been promised a comfortable airconditioned 4X4 vehicle for our tour, but what we got on our first day there was a beat-up van with a non-working air conditioner. When we complained about this, we were told that we would get the vehicle we had been promised in another 3 or 4 days. But the vehicle Harilala provided 4 days later was another older van (not a 4x4) which at least had a working air conditioner.
We were promised a full-time qualified birding guide that would be with us throughout our tour, but all we were given was a person who admittedly knew nothing about birds (who provided absolutely no relevant information regarding birds) and was with us for only the first 3 days days of our tour, After those first 3 days, we had no birding guide at all and had only a driver with us for the remainder of our tour. Considering that our tour promised that we would be stopping and trying to see birds as we traveled along from destination to destination, by not having a full-time qualified birding guide with us meant that we would miss out on seeing many species of birds that we should have seen, Keep in mind that Harilala had 9 full months from the time that we first paid a deposit for this tour to find and assign a qualified full-time birding guide to accompany us on this tour but he failed to do so.
We were promised that we would also have qualified local birding guides provided to us on 11 of the days of our tour, but the local guides that were provided were certainly not qualified to be birding guides. Except for 2 of them, the local birding guides that were chosen for us did not own or use binoculars. We have never met or heard of any legitimately qualified birding guide that did not own or use binoculars. Most of the local guides provided did not know the English names of the birds and had to repeatedly try looking up the names of the birds. They mis-identified the birds dozens of times. Two of the local guides did not speak understandable English. Incredibly, one of the local guides blatantly stated that he would not speak to us unless we bought lunch for him.
We were promised in our itinerary that all dinners and all breakfasts would be included in the price of our tour, but on 3 occasions when we checked in to our lodge or hotel, we were told that there was no record of these meals being included. On all 3 of these occasions, we had to ask them to contact Harilala to correct this so that our promised meals would be included. At the last hotel where we stayed, our reservation also had no record of meals being included. When they contacted Harilala about this, we were told by the hotel representative that Harilala deliberately chose the option where breakfast would be provided for only one of us, telling the hotel representative that the 2 of us could split the one breakfast. .
If you look at tour reports from other legitimate birding companies that offer birding tours in Madagascar that have followed the same itinerary as we did on our tour, you will find that a typical 2-week birding tour will result in seeing between 150-200 different bird species. On our tour, we only saw 102 different species. And the reason for that is because Hrilala, in addition to eliminating 2 days of our tour, failed to provide all the key elements that were promised to us, including a full-time qualified birding guide and truly qualified local birding guides.
Obviously, we tried again and again to contact Harilala about this. We made multiple telephone calls to Harilala, but he only answered one of them,and in that call ,he lied about many things. We sent many WhatsApp texts to him that were usually completely ignored, and if they were eventually answered, they were also full of lies and nonsensical explanations. For the last 3 days that we were in Madagascar, we repeatedly asked Harilala to meet with us in person to discuss what had transpired on our tour. He agreed to do so, and then on each of the next 3 days, he made us some excuse why he could show up.
Right after we returned home, we sent a detailed message to him explaining all the things that went wrong on our birding tour because of his failure to provide all that he had promised.We also requested a refund to make make up for the 2 days that he had eliminated form our tour and for not providing the full-time qualified birding guide that had been promised. Harilala said he would soon provide a response to this, and despite multiple further contacts with him over these last few months, he has never replied.
What makes this situation even worse is that Harilala could have warned us or told us in advance about these significant issues, but he never did. Harilala could have asked us if what he was doing would be acceptable, but he never did. Harilal could have offered us an explanation of why he made the choices he did about cutting short our tour and why the promised birding guides were not given to us, but he never did Harilala could have apologized to us for all these things, but he never did. Harilalla could have offered compensation or a refund for not providing what we had paid for, but he never did.
PLEASE BE WARNED: I would expect Harilala to respond to this review, and I expect that whatever he says will be the same kind of lies and fabrications that he has given to us. I believe that Hartilala is essentially a dishonest conman whose only goal is to make all the promises that you want to hear, then takes your money, and then fails to provide virtually anything that he promised,,
We would strongly suggest that you avoid booking any tour with Madagascar Natural Tours. There are many other tour providers in Madagascar that are honest and ethical and will deliver everything that they promise. Use one of them.
BD
20-35 years of age | Experience level: first safari
Really, he’s a good person
I was truly happy with their service during my trip to Kenya. Everything was perfectly organized, smooth, and stress-free. The team was very supportive, professional, and friendly from start to finish. I genuinely appreciate their effort and highly recommend their service to everyone.
AT
20-35 years of age | Experience level: first safari
Safari tour mud fight, up close among the animals with the best rally driver Godfrey
It started off quite pleasantly when we were picked up at the camp. Unfortunately, there had been a thunderstorm the day before, so while the temperature was comfortable, the safari roads were very slippery and muddy. We thought we'd just picked a bad day, but as the day progressed, it turned out the rain couldn't have been more perfect. The safari finally began. We saw lots of animals, especially the lions, up close. All around us, the safari vehicles were getting stuck, but our amazing Formula 1 driver, Mr. Godfrey, managed to get through almost without getting stuck, haha... Always eager to help, Godfrey also frequently assisted others who were struggling to control their vehicles on the slippery roads. It was a fantastic day full of experiences (adventures), just like you always say. I can only advise everyone who goes on a safari like this – take Elias as your guide and the famous Mr. Godfrey as your driver. For him and his 6-cylinder engine, there's no obstacle too difficult to overcome, and all without four-wheel drive. Another important thing – bring rubber boots; we could have really used them, haha. That's all I want to say except that it was a fantastic and accident-free day despite the rain – which actually made it even better…
