About this guide
Who's behind Visit Serengeti?
An independent guide to Serengeti National Park, built on TANAPA's own tariff data rather than on the fee tables that operator sites copy from each other.
Who writes this
This guide is written by someone who overlanded much of Africa in his own Land Cruiser with a rooftop tent, and for whom the national parks were what stayed. The information about them online was usually missing, wrong or years old: fees from three tariff sheets ago, camps that had closed, roads described by people who had never driven them.
So he started writing it down properly. This guide runs on the park authority's own documents, on climate normals rather than brochure weather, and on what the camps publish themselves, with a date on every claim.
What this site is
An independent guide to Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. It is not TANAPA's site, it is not a safari company, and it takes no bookings. Several websites with official-sounding names are tour operators; TANAPA's own address is tanzaniaparks.go.tz.
Almost everyone visits the Serengeti with a licensed operator, so the pages are written for that traveller first, with a self-drive section wherever the rules or the costs differ.
How it is funded, and what is not for sale
Nothing here is for sale. Listing a camp is free and no position on any page can be bought. Some outbound links earn us a small commission, and that changes neither the order of a list nor a single figure on these pages.
How we handle disputed facts
The Serengeti attracts a lot of wrong figures. A 2026 article claims a fee rise to $82.50 that never happened; TANAPA's own web page says its fees include VAT while its tariff sheet says they do not. We read the tariff sheets for 2021/22, 2022/23 and 2023/24 and TANAPA's own payment data for 2026/27, and print what the gate charges: $82.60.
Wildlife numbers carry their source and year. The wildebeest count is a good example: TAWIRI counted 1,571,960 in March 2023, TANAPA's own leaflet says about 1.35 million, and a satellite study published in 2025 found far fewer in the north. We give all three and say which is which. Found something outdated? Tell us and it changes the same week.
Related guides
We publish independent guides to a number of Africa's parks and reserves. In Tanzania the Serengeti sits alongside Ruaha, Nyerere, Katavi, Mahale and Udzungwa; across the border in Kenya, the Masai Mara guide covers the other half of the same ecosystem.