Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Luxury Zanzibar Beach is about the sand and the water rather than the hotels. It exists because the single most consequential fact about a Zanzibar beach holiday is one that almost no hotel page mentions.

On much of the east coast the sea retreats several hundred metres at low water and stays out for hours, exposing a shallow reef flat you can walk across. The island sits on a broad, gently sloping shelf, so a modest vertical change in the tide moves the waterline an enormous distance. The north, where the shelf narrows and the water deepens close inshore, is barely affected. Every photograph you have seen of an east-coast beach was taken at high water.

None of that is a defect and none of it should stop anybody going. It decides which coast you book and what you expect of an afternoon, and the disappointment is entirely preventable with one paragraph that nobody writes. The same is true of the seaweed: farmed on lines in the shallows, largely worked by women, and a significant local livelihood for decades rather than a cleaning failure. Asking a hotel to clear it would be asking it to remove somebody’s farm.

We describe these coasts rather than ranking them. Every one is somebody’s favourite, and the useful work is matching rather than grading — which mostly comes down to one question nobody asks: does somebody in your party want to swim in the sea at four in the afternoon?

We are not a safari operator. We do not own camps and we do not drive the vehicles.

Who arranges the safaris

When you send an enquiry it goes to Nomad Africa, our partner travel agency in Kenya. They build your itinerary, price it, hold the bookings, take the payments and look after you on the ground from the airport pickup to the flight home.

They plan and operate directly in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Botswana and Zanzibar, which is the whole of what we publish guides to. Where we do not have that depth, we say so rather than taking the enquiry.

It is one partnership, not a marketplace. We do not put your enquiry out to a panel of operators and we do not pass your details to anyone else.

The rules we write to

• No invented reviews. If you see a testimonial here, a real person wrote it and gave us permission to publish it with their name.
• No invented statistics or credentials. We do not claim licences, memberships, awards or numbers we cannot document.
• No promises about animals. Nobody can guarantee a river crossing or a leopard, and any site that implies otherwise is selling.
• Ranges, not fake precision. Where we publish costs they are clearly marked as indicative planning ranges. Your quote is the exact number.
• We say when something will not work. If your budget does not reach what you are picturing, or your dates are wrong for what you want to see, that goes in the first reply.

Part of a network

We publish a family of specialist Zanzibar guides, each going deeper on one subject than a single site could. This one is Luxury Zanzibar Beach: Hotel photographs are taken at high water, and the sea is not always there. These are the ones that sit closest to it:

• Bespoke Zanzibar — Which coast, which month, villa or hotel — Zanzibar assembled around how you want to travel.
• Zanzibar Luxury Hotels — The hotels, lodges and private villas, and the differences that actually change a stay.
• Luxury Safari Planner — Planning a luxury safari across East and Southern Africa: what the money actually buys, and how to spend it well.
• The Bespoke Safari — What bespoke actually means in safari planning — and, more usefully, what it does not.

They share this partnership and this editorial standard, and they link to each other wherever a question genuinely belongs on one of the others rather than here.

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