Only three properties on Earth scored higher than a game reserve on a South African river: two of them are Maldivian resorts, and one is a hotel in Osaka. That reserve has no city around it, no shopping, no theater district, just leopards and guides who know where to find them at first light. When hundreds of thousands of travelers were asked to name the finest hotels in the world, they placed it fourth, above every grand hotel in Paris, London and New York.
The United States is the largest source of foreign visitors to Kenya, where it accounts for 12.8% of all arrivals, and holds the same position in Tanzania. Those two countries hold 6 of the 9 African safari lodges that placed in this year’s rankings. Six in 10 American visitors to Kenya come for leisure rather than business. The travelers driving out at dawn are, more often than not, Americans, and the room they leave behind is one they have never thought to call a hotel.
Readers casting more than 661,000 votes in the 31st year of a global hotel survey ranked 10 African safari lodges, nine of which landed in the world’s 100 best hotels. They also ranked five African city hotels, in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Nairobi, cities with a century of grand hotels between them. Two made the list.
A game reserve outranked almost every hotel on earth
Lion Sands Game Reserve took first place among African safari lodges and fourth in the world. It runs along 13 miles of the Sabie River, with four lodges, two private villas and three open-air treehouses raised above the bush, where guests sleep with nothing overhead but sky. Photography masterclasses run through the reserve’s Creative Lab. The reserve is known for its leopards and for guides who can find them.
Tanzania’s coffee estate and Botswana’s stilted gallery
Elewana The Manor at Ngorongoro ranked second in Africa and 15th in the world. Its 18 cottage suites sit on a 1,500-acre working Arabica coffee estate in the Tanzanian highlands, near the rim of the crater. Guests descend to the crater floor to look for black rhino, then come back up to pick coffee cherries and roast them. The buildings are Cape Dutch, with log fires and claw-foot baths.
Xigera Safari Lodge placed fourth in Africa, scoring a level in the global ranking with the highest-placed city hotel on the continent. Its 12 suites stand on stilts in the Okavango Delta so that floodwater and wildlife pass beneath them. The lodge runs on solar power, and its rooms hold commissioned work by more than 80 African artists and makers. A steel baobab treehouse, a kilometer out on the floodplain, rises three levels above the water. Guests travel by mokoro, poled through papyrus channels.
The oldest safari family in Africa
Cottar’s 1920s Safari Camp ranked eighth in Africa and 77th in the world. The Cottar family has guided safaris in Kenya since 1919, five generations of them, and the camp keeps the period furniture, the gramophones and the cream canvas of that era. It sits in a private conservancy on the edge of the Maasai Mara. The family’s conservation trust leases 7,608 acres from the Maasai landowners who hold title to it, on terms that keep cattle and settlement off the land and hold open a wildlife corridor running toward the Serengeti. Guests eat from the camp garden and walk with guides raised on that ground.
Africa’s best city hotel places 35th
Cape Cadogan Boutique Hotel took first place among African city hotels. It is 29 rooms in a restored Georgian building in Cape Town, Table Mountain filling the window and the city’s best restaurants a short walk away. In the global ranking, it placed 35th, level with Xigera, which is only Africa’s fourth-best safari lodge. Johannesburg’s Saxon placed 90th. The other three ranked African city hotels did not reach global placement at all.
Six countries carry the safari list: South Africa, Tanzania, Botswana, Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda. No single tourism board or hotel group runs more than a few of them. Travelers across a continent’s worth of unrelated places arrived at the same verdict independently.
A city hotel can renovate, hire a better chef, redesign its lobby and add a spa floor. What it cannot do is put a leopard outside the window. The lodges on this list did not build the thing their guests voted for. They were built beside it. Americans send more visitors to Kenya and Tanzania than any other country does, and this year they spent their votes on the places with the least between the room and the animal.
Mandy is a luxury travel, fine dining and bucket-list-adventure journalist with expert insight from 47 countries. She uncovers unforgettable experiences around the world and brings them to life through immersive storytelling that blends indulgence, culture and discovery, and shares them with a global audience as co-founder of Food Drink Life. Her articles appear on MSN and through the Associated Press wire in major U.S. outlets, including NBC, the Daily News, Boston Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times and many more.