Wildlife Encounter (Reverse)

Traveler Reviews

• 

  Gareth

  March 6th, 2025
  3.0
  Potentially a very good product on offer, after all Africa is fantastic. That said unfortunately our experience of...
  Potentially a very good product on offer, after all Africa is fantastic. That said unfortunately our experience of the customer service received both before and after our trip was very disappointing. Very substantial changes made to our trip, and we were not even given the courtesy of a phone call to talk through alternative options. Our e-mail feeding back on some of the issues we encountered with some suggestions of how these might be addressed for other customers moving forward has been totally ignored. On a positive note the guides on tour know their business, and do their best to create a great, safe environment.Show more
  Traveled in February 2025
  

  Reply from: Absolute Africa

  Hi Gareth, thank you for leaving your comments. We are glad you enjoyed your tour with us. It was very unfortunate that we received last minute cancellations for your tour leaving you as the only two passengers booked on the Wildlife Encounter (Reverse). As a company we recognise the potentially detrimental financial, practical and emotional effects of making late tour cancellations for our passengers, and so we worked to provide an alternative itinerary for you within your original dates, along with the option to cancel with a full refund instead. We are always open to discussing any queries including any changes to itineraries over the phone; our standard method of communicating any changes though is by email as we have clients booking from all over the world and so email is usually the most convenient and timely way to connect initially. We are sorry our email didn't make it explicit that we would be more than happy to discuss further by phone/Whatsapp and we will ensure we make this clear in future communications of this nature. We do also apologise for the delay in replying directly to your feedback email but we are happy that you have now received this and hope that you will come back to travel with us again in the future.

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• V

  Victoria

  September 15th, 2016
  3.0
  I'll preface this by saying I have done an overland trip through Africa before, so this isn't my first time and I...
  I'll preface this by saying I have done an overland trip through Africa before, so this isn't my first time and I have something to compare it with. I chose this tour because I wanted to do Gorilla Tracking, the Ngorongoro Crater, and the Serengeti - and this was the only tour that covered all three in the shortest time (I didn't want to spend several weeks just to see those things along with a bunch that I wasn't interested in). Overall the experience was positive - but I wouldn't say that Absolute would be my first choice for a tour, and here's why: 1. The driving days were long, and other tour groups often tie some activity in to give you a break from sitting in a truck for 8 hours. On this tour it was 'wakeup - drive - set up camp - sleep - wakeup - repeat'. 2. Our guide, while extremely friendly and kind, seemed to lose interest in the tour halfway through (right about time the fridge broke) and stopped giving us briefings on what we were doing, where we were going and what was needed. Twice he forgot to tell us to buy lunches and didn't stop anywhere so we went without lunch. I often felt I had to ask lots of questions just to get an understanding of the lay of the land, or the culture of the region - things that I would expect to be part of the general script of a guide. He also wasn't great at delegating, leaving many people standing around while those of us who took initiative and actually asked what we could be doing did all the work. The chore roster was non-existent after day 2. He wasn't really a 'leader' so there wasn't much unity in our group - with two people deciding to eat lunch at the cafe of the Kigali Memorial, resulting in everyone else sitting and waiting for them, and then going without lunch because the supermarket we were meant to go to immediately after somehow got skipped. If he had simply told everyone to buy food at the memorial, or told those 2 people not to buy food, there wouldn't have been 9 people without eating between breakfast and dinner. 3. The truck wasn't in the greatest condition. I can handle wear & tear, but the fact that the fridge broke after 5 days (and took 3 days to fix), and the roof had a giant crack and was held together with duct tape, makes me think these trucks, designed to withstand everything Africa throws at them, need a bit better construction & maintenance. The sides coming off is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, for game drives, it's nice - but for everything else (the rest of the time) it's unfortunate because if you're too hot you can't 'open the window a crack', you have to open a whole side, which means dust EVERYWHERE, and the alternative is cooking yourself in the equivalent of a greenhouse. 4. While it may look like a better deal - Absolute being slightly cheaper than other groups, when you add on the cost of meals (which, contrary to what you might think for African groceries, wasn't cheap because we were taken to supermarkets rather than local markets) and the cost of the 'optional' activities that really should be part of the tour price, it works out to being quite expensive - if not more so, then at least equal to the other companies you might be comparing to. With the difference being they have a chef and actually make the food for you. We enjoyed our tour for what we got to see in Africa - the game drives, the gorillas, the golden monkeys. The camp sites were fine and the camping equipment was in good shape. But I think we might have enjoyed it more with a different tour provider. Show more
  Traveled in September 2016
  

  Reply from: Absolute Africa

  Thank you for taking the time to review your tour with us, Victoria. We are glad to hear that you did have a good trip but are sorry that you were not happy with some elements. As you mention, on this tour specifically, the key highlights are the mountain gorillas in Uganda and Tanzania’s most famous game parks - Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater. There is a vast amount of ground to cover in order to visit both, and a 10 day travel time frame does suit well for many clients. As with all the trips we aim to break the travel time where we can as well, allowing for passengers to take part in other activities along the way. We do realise that it can be hard work travelling this way, but it is the best way to fit these highlights in such a short time without flying. We are sorry to hear that you felt Manache lost interest during the tour and was not an able leader. We have had many favourable reports about his abilities as a tour leader, both regarding his organisation, approachability and knowledge of local areas, and so are surprised and sorry to hear your opinion. Our tour leaders are not trained to be guides in the same sense as European tour guides giving running commentary, but rather to organise the group throughout the tour. We do frequently get feedback about the knowledge of our tour leaders and how much they know and share about the areas through which we travel. We are sorry if this was not your experience on your tour. In regard to the truck condition, we would like to highlight that there wasn’t a crack in the roof but a dividing gap between two ceiling boards. These are not part of the roof itself but are interior panels to make the inside of the truck more aesthetically appealing. The gap is covered by a strip of metal held in place by rivets and a rivet had come undone thus the panels were temporarily held together by tape until the truck was able to get hold of a rivet gun to secure the boards together again. This kind of thing can happen from time to time due to the fact that roads in some of the parks can be extremely bumpy. This is probably also the reason why the fridge stopped working as some of its parts are quite delicate. Having a fridge onboard is a luxury and these we import from South Africa. They need an expert to fix it which on the section of your tour during rural Tanzania unfortunately is not available, so the fridge was fixed at the first available opportunity. Our trucks are routinely checked and maintained before and after tours, when they get back to our workshop in Arusha. They are custom fitted for overland travel through Africa and are hardy vehicles. The nature of overland travel though does put extreme pressure on any vehicle, regardless of how it is constructed. As part of the roads we travel on are dirt roads, there is no way of stopping the truck from becoming dusty whether it has roll up tarps or windows as it gets in through every opening available. Having tarps instead of the smaller glass windows provides better views for everyone and is usually a preference for most people travelling on our tours. In terms of the pricing of our tours, we are able to keep our costs down due to the fact that we are mainly a direct sell company and use a very few select agents. As a result we keep our overhead costs down and this is a saving we can pass onto our passengers. All of our tours do include breakfast and dinner for the time whilst travelling with the truck within the price. We do not provide lunch due to several reasons, one of which that people can choose what they eat and also have the choice of how much they want to spend on it. It is also in the nature of overlanding through Africa that there are a great choice of optional activities along the way, provided by external operators. These are very varied activities which are not to everyone’s preference. By working this way, it means that the tour is more affordable for those that just want to do the key highlights on this route, whilst also allowing those with a larger budget to take part in a wider variety of activities available. This is ethos throughout our tours. We are also very open about which inclusions there are in the tour and we offer tailored budgets at sale stage to ensure that you budget for all the specific optional excursions you may want to do, meaning that passengers can get a good idea of the total budget the trip will cost and enabling them to compare with other companies. The more expensive companies do also offer a wide variety of optional extras and so are also not “all inclusive”, keeping to the traditional style of overlanding. We do hope that you will remember visiting the gorillas and spending time in the amazing Serengeti and Ngorongoro Crater for many years to come.

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