High-ticket trips deserve a serious back office.
Week-long safaris, gorilla treks, photography tours — bookings worth thousands, made a year out, with lodges and park fees to pay long before the guest lands.
A $9,000 booking arrives — and now the work starts.
The lodge wants its deposit this month, the balance reminder is a calendar note, the park permits need passport numbers, and the whole file lives in an inbox thread titled “Re: Re: Fwd: Safari enquiry”.
Big prices, booked with small commitments
- Deposits and payment plans. A serious price tag never kills the booking — guests commit with a deposit and the balance collects itself on schedule.
- Automatic collection with retries. Instalments charge the saved card, retry on failure, and give guests a portal to fix things themselves.
- Cancellation tiers for year-long leads. Generous at ten months, firm at ten weeks — locked onto each booking at purchase, refunds in a click.
Your money, the moment it is paid
- Paid into your own account. Travelers pay straight into your Stripe account — Samba never holds your funds or delays a payout.
- Cash flow you can count on. Deposits land immediately, so lodge deposits, park fees, and guide retainers get paid from money you actually have.
- Invoices and credit notes, automatic. Proper paperwork for every payment and refund, with your legal details and tax handled.
Every detail before the bush
- Passports, visas, diets, insurance. Collected from each guest automatically, with due dates counting back from departure — permits and lodge rooming lists stop depending on email archaeology.
- A manifest for camp and guide. Who is arriving, what they eat, who to call — printable for the lodge and the driver-guide.
- Private itineraries. Request-to-book lets agents and families propose dates. Accept, and a private departure exists, sized to the party.
Vehicles, guides, and camps that cannot collide
- Vehicles as capacity. Each Land Cruiser carries a fixed number of guests — vehicles are resources on each departure and cannot be double-allocated across overlapping trips.
- Driver-guides on the roster. Assign guides per departure with availability tracked — each sees their season at a glance.
- Trip pages that sell the wild. Itineraries, galleries, guide profiles, and FAQs that do a flagship safari justice, and found on Google.
Sell a year out, get the deposit today, let the balance collect itself, and walk into every departure with passports gathered, vehicles allocated, and the lodge already paid — from your account, not ours.
Frequently asked questions
Does Samba handle safari capacity — vehicles, guides, camp beds — not just a headcount?
Yes. Vehicles, driver-guides, and any other resource with a limit — a Land Cruiser’s seven seats, a camp’s bed count — can be attached to a departure, and Samba won’t let one be double-allocated across overlapping trips. Capacity is whatever actually constrains your operation, not just a passenger count.
Can I take a deposit on a safari and collect the balance before departure?
Yes. Set a deposit and an installment schedule per trip, and Samba handles the rest — automatic reminders, retries on failed cards, and a self-service portal where guests can pay their balance without emailing you. Built for the long lead times safaris and wildlife trips usually book on.
Do my GetYourGuide bookings show up in the same manifest as direct bookings?
Yes. Channel bookings land in the same manifest as bookings from your own site — same departure, same passenger list, same passport and dietary details. No separate spreadsheet to reconcile before you build the manifest for camp or lodge.
What does Samba cost for a safari or wildlife operator?
$0 a month, no setup fees, no contracts. The first $10,000 in bookings is free; after that it’s a flat 2% per booking, which you can absorb or pass to travelers. Stripe processing is billed separately by Stripe.
How is this different from WeTravel for a safari operator?
WeTravel is built for the same kind of trip — deposits, installments, group travel. The difference is who holds the money and what it costs: Samba pays out to your own connected Stripe account rather than routing funds through us, and our fee is a flat, published 2% instead of WeTravel’s paid-plan structure. If you’re already set up on WeTravel and it’s working, that’s a real reason to stay; if the fee structure or fund custody bothers you, that’s exactly the gap Samba fills.
The parts that do the work.
Walk into every departure ready.
Free to start. No setup fees. No contracts.