We started IndiaWildLifeSafari because the alternative — what most travellers were getting when they came to look for tigers in India — was worse than it needed to be.
The model that dominates Indian wildlife travel has not changed in twenty years. A travel agent in a city packages a circuit. The traveller is handed off to a property at each stop. The property assigns a guide who is rotated based on whoever is on shift. The vehicle is shared with whoever else is staying. The guide may have been on the job a year, or twenty. The traveller has no way of knowing.
It works, in the sense that tigers get seen and lodges get filled. But it misses what a wildlife journey can be when it is built by people who know the land, with naturalists who have spent their working lives in it, in vehicles that you do not have to negotiate with strangers about.
[TO CONFIRM: founder name and brief background] founded IndiaWildLifeSafari in [YEAR] after [N] years working in Indian wildlife travel as [ROLE]. The premise was simple: handle the entire journey directly, employ the naturalists ourselves, work with a small set of properties we could vouch for, and stop pretending shared Jeeps were what travellers paying serious money were actually paying for.
"We came to this work because the alternative missed the point of being in the wild at all."
We have stayed deliberately small. Five destinations. A handful of signature journeys. A working set of properties. A naturalist team we know by name. Most of our travellers come back, or send their friends. We have never paid for an advertisement.
If you are reading this, you have probably been pointed here by someone who has travelled with us. We are glad you are.