Affiliate disclosure

The short version: some links here earn us a commission, you pay the same either way, nobody pays to be featured, and the fees that decide most of your Serengeti budget pay us nothing at all.

Which links are affiliate links

Every availability button, and every in-text link that opens a flight listing, points to GetYourGuide or Viator and carries our partner tag. Two of the four flights are sold on Viator and two on GetYourGuide. If you book after clicking one, the platform pays us a share of the commission it already earns from the operator. Your price is identical to the price you would see going straight to that listing, because our cut comes out of the platform's margin and is never added to your ticket.

The "Check rates" buttons beside the lodges named in our launch-site guide work the same way: they open the property's own page on Booking.com through the Travelpayouts affiliate network. A completed stay pays us a share of Booking.com's commission, and the room price you see is the same one you would get on Booking.com directly. In-text links that open a different experience, such as the Ngorongoro Crater day trip, the Maasai Mara balloon or the Tarangire balloon, are affiliate links to GetYourGuide or Viator on the same terms as the flights.

Those two platforms are the only affiliate relationships on this site. There are no camp or lodge links, no display advertising, no sponsored posts and no paid reviews. The flight videos embedded on the homepage earn us nothing, and neither does the map of Seronera beside them. If a third network is ever added, this page and the footer disclosure will name it before the first link goes live, not after.

The park fees, which pay us nothing

This is the part worth saying plainly, because it is the line most balloon pages leave out. Serengeti park entry is charged per person for every day you are inside the park, roughly $60 to $70 for a non-East African adult depending on season under the latest published TANAPA tariff, and it reaches TANAPA through your safari operator. Not one cent of it comes to us. We take no share whether your safari company bills it as a line item, folds it into a day rate or quotes you an all-in figure at the start.

There is a second fee in this story and it works the other way. TANAPA charges balloon operators $50 per passenger per flight for the operation and the landing, and that one is already inside the $599 you see on the listings, which is why the operators publish the same rate on their own sites. So the honest summary of a balloon morning is: one fee inside the price, one fee outside it, and every card here says which is which. A site that earns on the flight has an obvious incentive to blur that, and blurring it is exactly what would make the $599 look bigger than it is against everything else on your itinerary.

What it does not change

• Inclusion. Every flight that clears the tests is here: a real, currently bookable balloon flight over Serengeti National Park, sold to individuals with published dates, figures that survived two independent verification passes, and an unambiguous position on park fees. Four listings cleared all of it, run by four operators.
• Ordering. No operator can buy a position and none has been offered one. Where a section leads with one flight, that flight is the most-reviewed in its section, a rule you can check yourself against the numbers on the cards.
• What we say about them. Two of these listings are new: one carries 8 reviews and one carries 3, and both cards print those counts next to the 3,504 and 2,651 that dwarf them. None of the four showed a sell-out badge or a low-availability warning on either check, so none of them gets invented urgency here, however well that sells.
• What we leave out. Three listings were dropped during checking. One sells a balloon flight over a different national park altogether, one carried a 1.0 rating from its only two reviewers, and one was a second listing for a product already on this site, with a weaker score attached. All three would have paid commission exactly like the four we kept.
• Things we earn nothing from. Park entry fees, the safari that gets you within pickup range in the first place, your camp or lodge, and the tip you hand the ground crew after breakfast all pay us precisely zero. They still get their say in the guides wherever they matter more than the ticket does.

Ratings, review counts and prices

Every rating and review count on this site is the platform's own published number at the time we checked it, read off the live listing and then confirmed a second time on an independent pass before it was printed. Nothing is averaged across platforms, rounded up or invented, and where the two checks disagreed the figure was left off the page rather than smoothed over. The four run 4.9 across 3,504 reviews, 5.0 across 2,651, 4.9 across 8 and 5.0 across 3. A perfect score from three reviewers is printed as exactly that, three reviewers.

Prices work the same way and come with a bigger caveat. What you see is a current from-price, the cheapest per-person option on that listing when it was read: $599 on three of them and $643 on the champagne-breakfast morning. What you actually pay moves with the date, the option you pick and the country you book from, so the live listing is always the authority. A price that reads differently in two places usually means the platform is showing you a localized currency rather than that the operator has raised its rate. One of these four never exposes a price to a crawler at all, because that platform renders prices per visitor; the figure shown for it is the operator's own published rate for that exact product.

If you would rather not use our links

Search the operator's name on GetYourGuide or Viator directly, or find the operator's own website and book there. Serengeti Balloon Safaris, Miracle Experience, Nyssa Tourism Holdings and Beach & Safari Holidays all sell these mornings themselves, and the two classic operations publish the same $599 rate on their own sites that the listings show. Park fees are settled with your safari either way. We would genuinely rather you flew. The comparisons, the cost table, the FAQ and the guides work exactly as well as research whether or not you ever click a booking link.

Questions about any of this: email us. How the listings are checked in the first place is on the about page.