Who we are, and how we are paid

What this site is

Zanzibar Luxury Hotels is a taxonomy rather than a ranked list. We do not own properties on this island and we are not going to rank other people’s — a numbered list would tell you about our supplier relationships rather than about Zanzibar.

What is useful instead is the categories: the large resort, the small beach hotel, the converted merchant house in Stone Town, the private villa and the barefoot place. They are not points on one ladder. The expensive one is not always the right one, and the cheapest category has the most devoted repeat following on the island.

Then the questions that separate two properties at the same price — which coast, the pool, the room count, the board basis, the transfer time and whether there is air conditioning. None of those appears in a photograph of a bedroom, which is where nearly all the browsing time goes, and at this level the bedrooms are lovely nearly everywhere.

And a page on what no hotel here can control whatever it charges: the tide, the seaweed, the power and the mosquitoes. We publish it because a guest who blames a hotel for the tide had a planning problem rather than a hotel problem — and because the properties that mention these things on their own websites are, in our experience, the ones that are straight about everything else too.

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 Zanzibar Luxury Hotels: What a hotel can change, and the four things it cannot. 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.
• Luxury Zanzibar Beach — The beaches compared honestly: tide, seaweed season, and which coast works when.
• Bespoke Safari Collection — The camps, houses and private concessions a bespoke trip is actually assembled from.
• Luxury Safari Planner — Planning a luxury safari across East and Southern Africa: what the money actually buys, and how to spend it well.

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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