Ubunifu — 6 April 2026
I spent a part of my early career in luxury mobile safari operations — the halcyon days, as I think of them now, when putting a well-equipped tented camp into a genuinely remote wilderness location was considered a real achievement rather than a tired template. The model required a particular kind of thinking: about logistics and about what constituted comfort in an environment that offered none of the infrastructure normally associated with it, about how the absence of permanence could become a design feature rather than a concession to circumstance. The location changed, according to the season and the game. The experience did not. Guests were not buying a place; they were buying a delivery system for a specific kind of encounter with landscape and with service — and what that taught me, working through the operational detail of how such a thing is actually put together and made to function, has stayed with me.
So has the observation that no one has applied the same logic to a beach.
The safari camp is East Africa's invention — not camping in any general sense, but the idea of luxury camping as a coherent, replicable hospitality format, with all the operational complexity that entails: trained staff, specialised supply chains, sustainable infrastructure built to function at the edge of what a conventional system can reach. That format has been refined across Tanzania, Kenya, and the wider region over decades, and it continues to command price premiums that no equivalent format anywhere else in the world has come close to matching. The market has been tested at this price point for a generation. Demand consistently outstrips supply.
In recent years, a cohort of lifestyle-oriented brands — Habitas, Envi, and at the ultra-luxury end, Four Seasons Naviva and Six Senses — have done something that should, in retrospect, have been done here first. They took the essential logic of the safari camp — its light footprint, its relationship to landscape, its emphasis on experience over infrastructure — stripped out the accumulated conventions that had calcified around the original format, and redeployed it globally: Utah, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Morocco. In doing so, they identified something that the traditional operators had long since stopped communicating: that what made the safari camp genuinely valuable was never the khaki, or the diesel Land Cruiser, or the particular theatre of the bush breakfast — it was the quality of presence that the format created, the sense of being in a place rather than consuming it from behind glass.
The traditional East African circuit, by contrast, has in many parts become a parody of itself. The same vehicles, the same lodges, the same choreographed rhythms that guests move through at pace — one night here, one night there — in a format that has been replicated so many times across so many parks that the original logic of it, which was always about access and encounter rather than comfort and spectacle, has been largely obscured. The new entrants saw this more clearly than the incumbents did, and they built something more honest with the insight. The irony is not lost on those of us who watched it happen from inside the industry: East Africa gave the world its most copied hospitality model, then watched a generation of international lifestyle brands win sustainability awards for refining it.
What none of them have done, anywhere, is bring it to the coast.
This is the observation that became, for me, a quiet preoccupation.
Sixty percent of Zanzibar's visitors incorporate a safari into their trip. They have already encountered the premium East African hospitality model, already accepted its price point, already understood intuitively what the format means and what it is supposed to deliver. They arrive on the island having slept in a tented camp of some description — some with a very high description indeed — and what is waiting for them on the coast is largely conventional: concrete, fixed, resort-standard in ambition and frequently below it in execution. The operational vocabulary that made the bush experience feel intentional and specific to place is absent. The light footprint, the sense of being genuinely in a landscape rather than beside one, the quality of considered simplicity — gone.
The gap is real, and it has been there for as long as I have been working on this coastline.
The typology does not yet exist in any meaningful sense. Beach camp, as a term, still conjures for most people a budget arrangement with communal facilities, or something organised for children during school holidays — it has not been commodified in the way that Beach Club has been, a phrase that at least carries some suggestion of a considered offering, however varied its meanings across Ibiza, the Italian coast, and Bali. Beach Camp carries no equivalent weight because no one has built one worth remembering, and the concept has never been brought to a market that might actually pay for it seriously.
That is both the gap and the opportunity. The category is unclaimed. The assets and infrastructure to populate it exist in East Africa and nowhere else with quite the same depth — trained staff for exactly this kind of remote operation, established supply chains for semi-permanent structures, operational knowledge for managing sites without grid dependency, conservation-planning experience sufficient to make a credible case to governments for light-touch development on sensitive or restricted land. East Africa has all of this and a coastline. What it lacks is someone having assembled those elements into a format, named it, and taken it to market.
There is also a site argument that has been strengthening with time.
Unguja is developing quickly, and the pattern of that development is concentrating value in a relatively small number of accessible locations while leaving the rest of the island — and the broader archipelago — under-served by any hospitality offer of real quality. The Zanzibar government is already directing attention toward Pemba, toward remote stretches of the northern and southern coastline, and toward sites that conventional hotel development has not been able to reach because the economics of permanent construction on leased or privately-held land do not support it. The investor-owner relationship has broken down often enough in this market that caution is now rational on both sides — owners with exceptional sites are reluctant to grant the access terms that permanent development requires, and investors are reluctant to commit capital to fixed assets on land they do not control, having watched enough cautionary examples play out.
A camp model resolves most of this. The assets belong to the brand, not the site. The footprint is reversible — at the end of a lease, the units demount, the site returns to its natural state within a season or two, and the camp moves elsewhere. The capital requirement is lower than any fixed-structure development, and the return timeline is compressed accordingly. For a landowner who wants their site to generate income and profile without surrendering it permanently, and for a government with an active sustainability agenda, the proposition is relatively easy to make. I know a number of privately-held sites along this coast — some substantial, some islands — whose owners would entertain a well-structured approach of this kind, and that observation has been part of what keeps this project alive in my thinking over a number of years.
There is one further dimension that makes the timing feel right rather than merely interesting.
The beach-and-bush circuit is an established travel pattern across East Africa, and it generates a specific kind of guest — one who moves between a high-quality wilderness experience and a high-quality coastal one as a matter of course, who understands the difference between those environments and what each should offer, and who brings a price tolerance calibrated to what the bush has trained them to expect. What does not exist is a coastal option that speaks the same operational language as the wilderness camps — the same quality of grounded, low-impact, high-intention hospitality that has been developed in the Serengeti, in the canyon country of Utah, in the wadis of Oman. A BeachCamp on a remote or island site in the Zanzibar archipelago would not simply introduce a new accommodation format; it would complete a circuit that already has its market and already knows what it is worth, with the missing coastal leg finally in place.
East Africa invented the safari camp. The beach version has not been built yet. This is, for me, a project sustained by observation rather than urgency — something I return to when the conditions shift, when a site comes into view, when the right conversation opens. The concept is worked out. The format is clear enough. What it waits for is the moment when those elements converge with the people best placed to move it forward.