Tanzania, Roy Safaris: Please Help!
 

Dear Fellow Travellers,

If you have personal experiences with and/or relationships to Roy Safaris Ltd. in Tanzania, please let me know whom at the management level I can contact in a confidential manner. (Other suggestions are welcome too.)

Thank you very much for your advice!

Regards,
Marcus


P.S.:
The background is as follows.
Since more than eight months now I have booked an extended tour with Roy Safaris. It is scheduled to start pretty soon. In the process of finalising the itinerary and arranging some additional details the contact person at Roy Safaris became less and less responsive and recently even indicated a cancellation of the trip. As I do not think that this attitude is supported by the management of Roy Safaris and because I also do not really want to have our trip cancelled, I would like to approach the management in an attempt to sort out all pending issues.

Hey, would you mind emailing, me, I would like a few more details about your problems:

[email protected]

Actually, don't worry about emailing. If you could just elaborate a bit on the problem:

1. Had you already made your deposit when these problems occurred?

2. Had you received a "confirmation" (email or otherwise) from Roy's?

3. How soon is it scheduled to start?

I ask because I have had an excellent experience booking my August trip with them so, of course, your post raises some concerns.

Hi schlegal1, you should find my mail in your in-box at AOL.

Hi Marcus -

I can appreciate your frustration in that your plans for your upcoming safari may be running into a wall.

Only because it's rare to see such a post regarding Roys that my curiousity is peaked. Sure, some travelers may find their prices higher then another outfitter, or they may not be able to get certain properties... but it's rare that they are not responsive. If you don't wish to post here - though I feel it would be important for others to be aware - you can feel free to send me the information at [email protected]

My interest is that of a recent client of Roys who were more then attentive to our needs and with the possibility of using them again. Thanks.

Thank you very much for your response, Sandi. You should find mail in your in-box.

Sandi, [email protected] does not accept e-mail.

Can you please send a short message to [email protected] so that I can reply. Thanks a lot.

MarcusW -

I must have been a bit daft yesterday. The correct email:

[email protected]

(don't know why I entered "www" - can't imagine where my mind wandered off? ) but will send direct to you. Sorry for the mixup.

Hi Marcus,
I know you only posted this yesterday, but have you had any luck finding out what's going on? I have booked a trip with Roy's for the end of August, & your message is concerning me. They directed me to liaise with an agent in the US, and they have been nothing but extremely helpful and responsive.
It sounds like your issue is with the agent and not Roy's. Is that correct?
Cheer

Dear all:

I am very pleased to let you know that all difficulties which we encountered at Roy Safaris recently have been completely resolved in the meanwhile!

We were contacted by Mr. Sanjay personally, who is the operations director at Roy Safaris in Tanzania and who shows an extremely helpful and supporting attitude. He did not only provide us with a complete and detailed itinerary which describes all arrangements exactly as discussed earlier, but he also answered all pending question and he even gave me a telephone call yesterday.

This is exactly the way how to make clients happy. :-)

The reasons for our problems turned out to be mere difficulties in communication. In part they are due to a language barrier. (As a European I am communicating directly with the representatives of Roy’s in Tanzania, which means that usually none of the parties involved is a native English speaker.)


We are now really looking forward to our 25-days trip with Roy Safaris which starts on July 27 and I will provide you with a short report as soon as we are back in August.


Keep booking with Roy’s!

MarcusW


P.S.:
Special thanks goes to schlegal1…

Marcus -

Glad to hear all worked out. I'm sure your safari will be outstanding and do touch base on your return with a report and photos. Happy travels.

I have also booked with Roys and leave on July 30. They have been wonderfully responsive, answering all of my (many) questions, making numerous changes in the itinerary - even a last minute one, with no problems or charges. Comments on this board about Roys have been so favorable which is why I chose to go with them. Will report back when we return.

Our May/June 2005 Safari was arranged by Roy Safaris and they were extremely good. Everything was arranged correctly as discussed here in the US. We highly recommend them.

Marcus and others:
Since we don't know who is behind the posts that appear here, it can be impossible to weed out the real help from the ones from the agents who have an affiliation with an African operator. Most of the reason Roy's is even on this board is because one of their agents posted endlessly here about them. I didn't know that she was their US agent, which after all makes them like every other operator in Tanzania if you are in fact booking through a US agent, right? You are paying for their trips to Africa everytime you travel with Roy's. I am somewhat suspect when one of the posters here wants to private email with someone about selecting an operator. Keep all posts out in the open where others here can comment also. I am quite sure that the TA I relied on unknowingly is again posting here under another name. I just wish they would disclose these things but I can surely see why they don't.
The attitude that Marcus experienced is very common with Roy's. Sanjay is the director of operations and doesn't get into the booking of the safaris. He is a wonderful person. We loved him and he actually had to personally drive to Ngorongoro Crater and drive us to Arusha when we had serious problems with our guide. His wife is the one who owns the company, passed on from her brother when he tired of it. She books the safaris, has many attitude problems and doesn't treat people very well at all.
If you are getting gushing recommendations from someone here, first you might just consider that they may have an affiliation with a company. Fodors is one of the few chat boards that does not police this matter and TA's tend to gather here.
Please get other bids from some really top operators in Tanzania. In my entire trip there in March, a busy season time, I never saw another vehicle of Roy's on the Serengeti or the entire country of Tanzania where we visited. Rather we saw many Predators vehicles and the really top one, Kibo Safaris was all over. I talked to their customers when we were at camps. Their guides were surely different than ours.
This is how things are. Just get other opinions, not just from here, but from operators of safaris in Tanzania directly.
Each of us are ultimately responsible for the success or failures of our own safaris, please don't just rely on the people here when they may have more to gain than you know. I found that out the hard way.
If you do a search here you can pull up the trip report I posted when I returned. You will not find a recommendation to use Roy's Safaris. Liz

Liz,
What specific problems did you have with your guide? I know you briefly mentioned there were some issues in your trip report, but I didn't really understand what they were and until today didn't know that they were serious enough to have someone else drive you back to Arusha. Would you mind elaborating?

Patty-
I told Sanjay and wrote up the things at his request, and asked him to not ask any further of us. I do not feel I should post on an open forum, or to strangers something of this nature. Please understand. It isn't my intent to hurt anyone, just to be sure Roy's understood the severity of what happened to us (and I am confident, to others before us).
I wasn't looking to get into it more, but when a thread of this title is begging for info and no one even mentions there may be other things that have been posted here, I had to comment. Sorry but this is one time I won't explain further. I think the saying goes something like.......
Let the buyer beware or.... to be forewarned, is to be forearmed. It applies here. Liz

Liz,

First of all: Sorry to read that you faced serious troubles with your guide. This is really a disappointment when it happens. I had a bad experience once in Nepal and therefore I know what it can be about…

Did you get proper support from the side of the company? Was the solution satisfying?

In our own case I am really looking forward to our trip now. I have the impression that Sanjay is doing everything possible to make it a success. He spends a lot of time communicating with us, which is probably the best way to avoid misunderstandings and to resolve all issues properly. Consequently I am pretty optimistic now, 10 days before departure.

In our case it was really the process of communication itself which was about to go wrong – and now seems to be back on track again. Therefore I would like to mention that a local agent, had there been one involved in our case, might well have been able to avoid unnecessary confusion. Of course we are very happy to be under special “surveillance” of the Director Operations, but this cannot serve as a regular business model on a larger scale, I suppose. A travel agent sometimes may serve as valuable mediator and translator, I would say. This can make the process of planning and booking much smoother.

Responsiveness of Roy’s has now evolved to a truly exciting level in our case, by the way: We received a proposal today to change the itinerary a little bit and leave part of it within the Serengeti flexible out of the reason that this year due to very late rain the large herds are delayed and are partly still in the Northern Serengeti. You can imagine what a surprise this is for us.

I am not sure if all tour operators in Tanzania are as pro-active as Roy’s have been in this case.

Happy planning!

MarcusW (who has no personal affiliation whatsoever with Roy Safaris Ltd.)

Liz -- I thought overall you enjoyed your safari aside from the appalling issue of hunting in the Loliondo area. I don't remember you saying that you wouldn't recommend Roy's. That is information that I, for one, would have been interested in knowing since they were on the list of operators I originally contacted to price our itinerary. I'm sure others would be interested in your opinion of them as well. Then people can weigh the good and the bad and make an informed choice.

Marcus-
I am very happy you have resolved your issues. Had I had the options you have our outcome would have been different. I know you will have a perfect safari because Sanjay is just that kind of person, however, he cannot do this with everyone and very few get elevated to him in the planning stages. After our comments after the safari they may have changed their program and that is very good. Liz

Lisa-
We had a wonderful safari because we separated the problems with our guide from the actual daily things. We had no other choice. It did dampen things but I saw no point to include it.
If you read my trip report you will see that I recommend contacting both Predators and Kibo as I have done since our trip whenever I see someone requesting that information. I also upon my return, in a post, withdrew the recommendation for Roy's that I had previously made before our trip. I told Sanjay I would do that and I told him in our write up that I had done as I said I would.
My report is one of the few if not only report that does not ever mention anything good about our guide nor do I speak on that subject favorably. I mention at one point when the problems elevated and then I drop it as I thought people would focus on something that couldn't be changed. More than that would serve no useful purpose. If people take that as a recommendation for using them then they can't complain later to me.
Since I don't post here anymore nor even read the threads unless I am looking for something, you can only access my posts by using the search function and ask about Roy's. It should be something anyone would do and my posts will be there to see too. Liz