The most expensive habit in tour operations is pricing from the last quote. Somebody asks for a similar trip, the previous sheet gets copied, two numbers get changed, and the margin quietly disappears into a park fee that went up in October or an extra traveller who was never re-costed.
This guide covers the arithmetic underneath a safari price. It won’t tell you what to charge — that depends on your cost base and your market — but it will tell you how to build a number you can defend and reprice quickly. Our free tour costing sheet implements the structure described here.
Why does a safari have to be costed twice?
Because two different kinds of cost behave in two different ways, and averaging them together is how operators lose money on small groups.
Fixed costs do not change with the number of travellers. A safari vehicle costs what it costs whether two people or six are sitting in it. The driver-guide is paid the same. Most point-to-point road transfers are priced per vehicle, not per head.
Per-person costs scale directly with headcount. Park and conservancy entry fees are charged per person per day. Accommodation is charged per person or per room. Meals, activities and flights are per person.
The per-person price of a trip is therefore:
(total fixed costs ÷ number of travellers) + total per-person costs + margin
Get that division wrong and the error compounds across every day of the itinerary.
A worked example
The numbers below are illustrative. They demonstrate the arithmetic, not market rates — use your own supplier costs and the current published park fees.
Take a four-day trip for four travellers.
| Cost | Type | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Vehicle + driver-guide, 4 days | Fixed | 60,000 |
| Airport transfers | Fixed | 8,000 |
| Park entry, 4 people × 3 days | Per-person | 96,000 |
| Accommodation, 4 people × 3 nights | Per-person | 144,000 |
| Meals and drinking water | Per-person | 24,000 |
Fixed total is 68,000, which is 17,000 per person across four travellers. Per-person total is 264,000 ÷ 4 = 66,000. So the cost per person before margin is 83,000.
Now change one variable. Drop to two travellers and the fixed share per person doubles to 34,000, while the per-person costs stay flat at 66,000 — a cost per person of 100,000, more than 20% higher, with nothing else about the trip changed.
This is why a single per-person rate is not a price. It is a price at a particular group size.
How should you handle group-size breakpoints?
Quote in bands, and set the bands where your fixed costs actually step.
The bands are not arbitrary — they follow the capacity of the things you are buying. A vehicle that seats six creates a breakpoint at seven, because the seventh traveller means a second vehicle and a second guide, and the fixed cost jumps rather than drifting. Room configurations create the same effect: a traveller without a room-mate carries a single supplement, which is a fixed cost attached to one person.
Two rules keep this manageable:
- Never quote a per-person rate without stating the group size it assumes. “USD X per person, based on 4 travellers sharing” is a price. “USD X per person” is an invitation to a dispute.
- Re-cost, don’t interpolate, when the group changes. If a party of four becomes a party of three, the answer is not to nudge the number up a little. The fixed share changed by a known amount and the arithmetic is quick.
What about park fees and other third-party costs?
Treat them as pass-through costs taken from the current published schedule, shown as their own line, and re-checked every time you quote.
The Kenya Wildlife Service revised its fee schedule under the Wildlife Conservation and Management (Access and Conservation) (Fees) Regulations, 2025, effective 1 October 2025 — the first substantial revision in roughly eighteen years, replacing rates unchanged since 2007. Fees are paid via KWSPay on eCitizen. Parks outside the KWS system, including reserves run by county governments and private conservancies, publish their own rates separately.
The operational point is not the specific figures, which will move again. It is that a costing sheet holding hard-coded fee amounts from an old quote will silently under-price every trip after a revision — and the revision won’t announce itself in your spreadsheet.
How do you handle currency exposure?
Decide which currency you are exposed in, and stop the exposure from reaching the client unannounced.
Most operators buy in one currency and sell in another: suppliers invoicing in KES, international travellers paying in USD or EUR. Between quoting and payment, the rate moves. That movement is a real cost and it lands on whoever didn’t plan for it.
Three things reduce the damage:
- Put a validity date on every quote. This is the single most effective control. It converts open-ended currency risk into a bounded window you chose.
- State the exchange basis on the document. If the quote shows both KES and USD, say which rate was used and on what date.
- Cost in the currency you pay suppliers in, then convert once at the end. Converting each line item separately compounds rounding and hides where the exposure actually sits.
Kenya’s inbound market is genuinely multi-currency, which is why this matters more here than it might elsewhere. The Tourism Research Institute reported 2.7 million international arrivals in 2025, up 9% year on year, with Africa supplying 47% of arrivals, Europe 25% and the Americas 14% — three regions, three payment currencies, one cost base.
Where should margin go?
On top of the fully-loaded cost, applied consistently, and visible before you send.
Two failure modes are worth naming. The first is applying margin to some lines and not others — usually accommodation gets a mark-up while park fees and transfers are passed through at cost, which is a defensible policy but only if it’s deliberate rather than accidental. The second is discounting the total without re-checking what the discount does to the fixed-cost share, which is how a “small” concession on a two-person trip eats an entire trip’s profit.
No guide can tell you what your margin should be. What a costing structure can do is make the margin visible on every quote before it goes out, so the decision to discount is a decision rather than a discovery.
Costing once instead of every time
The arithmetic above is not difficult. It is just tedious, and tedium is what gets skipped when a client is waiting.
The structural fix is to stop treating each trip as a fresh costing exercise. Supplier rates, park fees, standard vehicle costs and recurring day plans are stable between trips; only the combination changes. When those live as reusable components rather than as cells in last month’s spreadsheet, re-costing for a different group size or an updated fee schedule is a recalculation, not a rebuild.
Work from our free tour costing sheet — the fixed/per-person split is already laid out. Free, no email required.