Tipping Guidelines for Safaris

Tipping Guidelines for Safaris

Here are our tipping guidelines for the Safari guide.

• Private safari tour: USD 20-35 per day (from everyone in the vehicle combined)
• Group safari tour(in Tanzania): USD 10 per day per client.

You can tip the amount in USD or in local currency (Tanzanian shillings in Tanzania or Kenyan Shillings in Kenya or Ugandan Shillings in Uganda or Rwandan Shillings in Rwanda and as with all tours in East Africa, tipping happens only on the last day, after your tour has concluded and when you are about to say goodbye to your guide. 

You can also consider paying tip to the staff At accommodations but we usually don't share a suggested amount for this. Clients put their tip at a common tip box at reception.

FAQs on Tipping

1. Why should I tip?

At Kim.tours, our crew are paid above the minimum wages. However, to sustain a fair quality of life, safari staff need your generosity to keep on delivering outstanding service. The tipping system in the East African service industry follows the American-style. In essence, a tip is not merely a reward for exceptionally attentive service or hard work, but rather a highly anticipated payment intended to bridge the gap between the modest wages received by crew vs ever increasing cost of living in cities and towns of East Africa.

2. Why don't you pay higher salaries to your staff and do away with tipping?

While this is possible, it will increase your tour price quite a bit.

One of the important reasons why tour operators don't increase crew members' salaries and do away with the tipping custom is that the crew are strongly in favor of the tipping. This is because the tipping system allows them to earn a livable wage while staying below the tax threshold.

To give you an idea, if you pay $100 as a tip to your guide after safari, he gets entire $100 for himself. If you wish for this amount to be included as part of salary, we might have to charge you well over $150 as various deductions and costs apply between what you pay to tour operator and what tour operator can pay as salary to the staff (VAT, PAYE or withholding tax, WCCF, banking charges, accounting charges etc).

Given how price competitive the market is, it is not within our capacity to go against the tipping customs that are followed by 99.9% of operators and increase our prices to account for tipping and associated taxes and costs and still attract business.

Plus, tipping acts as a strong motivating factor for guides to deliver their best performance on each tour. Fixed salary is not as motivating as a rewards based one.

3. Can I prepay the tips?

Unfortunately this is not possible at the moment. Even if it were possible, please note over 30% of what you pay will be deducted from what guides receive because of various taxes and costs associated, if the tour operators are involved in the process. So we prefer not to get involved in the tipping process.

4. When should I pay the tip?

At the end of your tour with the guide, which is usually the last day of your safari.

Tanzania’s economy: issues with tipping

Tipping in Tanzania should always depend on the quality of service received, and it is your choice whether or not to tip. Of course we encourage our travellers to appreciate good service, but we also try to make them aware of the impact of tipping on the local community. 

For those working in the service industry in Tanzania, including waiters, guides and trackers, tips can form a significant part of their income. However, there is a fine balance between tipping enough, and tipping too much. You may not think that tipping too much could cause problems, but excessive tips can throw out the balance of the local economy.

To understand this better, consider the work of a senior park ranger. To achieve this status requires a high level of education and knowledge, as well as several years’ experience in different national parks. If done properly, this is a very important role, and a fair wage is paid for the job, but government-employed rangers aren’t usually top earners. Yet both the parks and their visitors benefit if educated and competent people are appointed to this kind of post. 

Conversely, a safari camp assistant, who helps out generally and perhaps carries bags for guests, is also very necessary. Yet s/he doesn’t need to be so educated, or to have as much experience as a ranger, and s/he certainly won’t have the same level of responsibility or the same salary. So consider the effect if such a worker gets massive tips – totalling, say, US$500 a month. If that happens, there’s a very real possibility that s/he will end up earning more than the park’s ranger.

In this case, the local balance of responsibility and remuneration is distorted by the tips – which are too high. If this happened too often, it would remove the incentive for a ranger to work harder and take on more responsibility – and could well see park rangers giving up their jobs to become camp assistants, to the detriment of the park and its visitors.

So before you tip, do try to bear in mind the importance and extent of the work someone is doing for you, and remember to keep your tips proportionate.

Who to tip and when on a Tanzania safari

It’s important to know who would appreciate a tip on a safari, as there are many people working to make your travel a success. Consider:
 

• Tipping guides
• Tipping the ‘team’ of staff
• Do I tip the managers?

To summarise, normally in Tanzania you tip your guide separately, as you’ll spend most of the time with him or her, and the rest of the staff together. It is unusual to tip the camp manager. 
 

When to tip

Another frequently asked question is the best time to give tips. There are three options:

After each activity
At the end of each day
At the end of your stay

Best practice is always to tip just once, and always at the end of your stay at each safari lodge or camp.

Your guides won’t expect you to tip after each activity, and doing so could put pressure on them to ‘perform’ for the guest who is tipping – while probably distorting the relationship between him/her and the guests as a whole. It would certainly put your fellow guests in a very difficult position if you were offering tips this frequently, and they were not.
 

How to tip

The most common way how to tip in Tanzania is to use the ‘tip box’ that most camps offer. However, sometimes the box will be for all the staff, and sometimes for the staff excluding the guides; each camp has its own policy.

Some camps explain their policy in writing and leave it in their rooms. If not, ask the manager if there’s a tip box and, if so, who shares the proceeds. Then it’s up to you whether to put everything into the box, or to tip some team members individually. In most Tanzanian camps, guides, trackers and butlers are usually tipped direct, while other staff benefit from the ‘general staff tip box’. But this varies, so do ask!

It’s most common to tip in cash, ideally Tanzanian shillings or US dollars. Although some camps offer the option to tip by credit card, this depends on their accounting practices and their ability to process cards. Tipping by card isn’t the norm in Tanzania, and it can make it difficult to direct your tips to specific members of staff. 

For travellers willing to think ahead, it can work well to bring a small supply of envelopes, perhaps with a card inside on which a ‘thank you’ could be written. Then towards the end of your stay, you can address the envelopes for the individuals or groups of staff whom you wish to tip, put the appropriate amount into each, and either hand them out or put them into the general tip box.
 

How much to tip

The amounts we suggest here are just guidelines based on our experience of safaris in Tanzania. Tipping is a matter of personal opinion and individual satisfaction – moderated by some understanding of the issues mentioned above.

Given that, we’d recommend that for good service, our travellers tip around:
 

• US$8–10 per guest per day for a group guide
• US$8–10 per guest per day for a private guide
• US$8–10 per guest per day for the hotel or safari camp, which is then distributed amongst camp staff (excluding safari guides)
• US$3–5 per city transfer

In reference to the impact on the economy, note that the gross national income (GNI) in Tanzania is about US$2.49 per person per day. This is a reflection of the average income of Tanzania’s citizens.

By contrast, the equivalent GNI in the UK is about US$118.74; in the United States about USS150.58; in New Zealand about US$109.80; and in Germany about US$125.45.

In conclusion, we want to highlight that while tipping is a sensitive issue, there is no need to feel embarrassed as it is a normal part of the service industry in Tanzania. But please remember that relatively affluent visitors can have a big impact on the local economy. Tipping unwisely can distort the economic and social balance, so we would ask you to keep that in mind when you tip the staff during your safari in Tanzania.