How we rank destinations

Why there is no single list

A country that suits a photographer is not the one that suits a first safari, and one combined order would have to misrepresent both. Rwanda sells one of the great wildlife encounters on Earth from four small parks; Botswana offers world-class wilderness at a price that rules it out for many travellers. Neither fact is captured by a single number, so we rank separately for each kind of trip.

What we score

We score individual parks and reserves from 1 to 10 for each kind of traveller, weighing everything that matters to them at once — wildlife density and how predictably you see it, whether the park allows off-road driving, night drives, walking or hides, the quality of the light, how crowded sightings get, travel logistics, cost, and any age limits.

Scores are set by us, from our own experience and from published park regulations. No marketplace ratings and no third-party review scores are used as inputs.

How a country score is calculated

A country is as good as its best parks, with credit for depth. We take its five highest-scoring parks for the chosen traveller and average them with descending weights of 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1, then multiply by ten to give a score out of 100.

Averaging every park would punish countries with a long tail of smaller reserves; using only the best park would ignore whether there is enough for a week or three.

When a country is not ranked

A country enters a ranking only once we have scored at least three of its parks for that traveller. Below that it appears without a position rather than at the bottom — thin coverage on our side is not a verdict on the destination.

Ties

Countries on the same score are separated, in order, by:

• how many of their parks score 8 or above
• how many parks we have scored there
• country name, so the order never shifts between runs

What this ranking is not

It carries no customer reviews and no star ratings. We do not collect ratings from travellers, and presenting an editorial judgement as if visitors had voted on it would be misleading — so the pages show a position and plain facts instead.

The ranking is recalculated only when we change the underlying scores, never automatically, and every published position carries the version of the method that produced it.