5 Reasons to Go on a Family Safari with Micato

By Micato Staff March 3, 2024

The ultimate luxury… time with our families.

We all thought technology would enable us to carve out more free time. Yet the exact opposite has happened. We find ourselves tethered to our devices at all hours of the day and night. We’ve never been more connected and yet, more isolated from each other.

And as our children head off to college and the world beyond while our parents celebrate octogenarian birthdays, the opportunities to connect as a family have become less frequent, more precious.

And highly coveted.

5 Reasons to Go on a Micato Family Safari

A Micato Family Safari is the perfect tonic to our fast-spinning world. It’s one of the few experiences on earth where family members can reconnect and share the awe, beauty, and restorative powers of wildlife as the antidote to our hectic and disconnected lives at home.

Reason #1 to Go on a Micato Family Safari: The Animals

The youngest and oldest of us have seen reflections of Africa’s marvelous animals all our lives, from beloved plush toys to cartoons to documentaries and films.

And yet here, on daily game drives, we see them by the free-roaming thousands, in the warm flesh, and we’re enraptured.

Game viewing presents us with a canvas of lion, leopard, cheetah, elephant, rhino and giraffe await on your family adventure, accompanied by hundreds of thousands of wildebeest, zebra and gazelle.

A million bright pink flamingos soar over Rift Valley lakes and savannahs, pods of hippos bob and chortle in the clear rivers of the Okavango Delta, while legendary game lands from Kruger National Park to the Maasai Mara and Serengeti await, with the majestic square top of Mount Kilimanjaro standing guard over the plains.

Reason #2 to Go on a Micato Family Safari: The Memories

African nights are impressively quiet, broken only by the sound of the occasional lion calling to his mate in the distance. Watching the twinkling of a billion stars overhead from the verandah of your luxurious tent is a treasured routine as you come to recognize the constellations of the Southern night sky.

These are the nights your children will remind each other of for a very long time to come.

There are no kids clubs on the savannahs, no recourse or reason for teens to excuse themselves from breakfast and disappear until dinner. Safari creates moments you desperately don’t want each other to miss. And so there is almost a quiet urgency to be together. By day, in addition to exciting game drives, family with children will find no shortage of activities from horseback riding over the plains to camel treks, hiking, bicycling, even quad biking. Longing to reconnect through fitness? Jogging in the bush, accompanied by a sure-footed Maasai warrior, is the ultimate way.

Reason #3 to Go on a Micato Family Safari: A Highly-Credentialed Micato Safari Director Accompanies Every Micato Safari

To every Micato journey we add a dash of Hakuna Matata — Swahili for ‘No problem!’ Africa is no place for a patchwork itinerary, so a personal safari director accompanies your safari from beginning to end to choreograph your family’s every desire. A 24/7 concierge is also on call to handle forgotten items or midnight cravings. And daily complimentary laundry and a no tipping policy are just some of many stress-eliminating benefits thrown in for good measure.

Reason #4 to Go on a Micato Family Safari: We Are Family

The Micato Team constantly scouts new lodges and experiences on the ground, a team that includes Felix and Jane Pinto, who founded Micato in 1966, and the New York-based Pintos: Dennis, Joy, and their children Sasha and Tristan. For more than 25 summers the Pinto family safari has doubled as a test drive to find what has often turned out to be the next new and noteworthy “it” destination.

This relentless love of travel, of visiting— and, so critically, revisiting— the places we send our guests— is perhaps one reason why Travel+Leisure has noted that “Micato Safaris’ edge is personal warmth. The Pinto family run their show as though they were entertaining well-loved, out-of-town relatives,” perhaps why Micato has landed in the #1 spot on Travel+Leisure’s World’s Best Safari Outfitter list an unprecedented 10 times, while also being the only safari outfitter in the Travel+Leisure Hall of Fame.

Reason #5 to Go on a Micato Family Safari: AmericaShare

While safari is our family business, education is our passion. Working together with our non-profit foundation, AmericaShare, we send a child to school for every guest on safari . We call this The Micato One for One Commitment.

AmericaShare supporter and Micato traveller Barbara Albert said it best, “AmericaShare is transformative. The first time my daughter and I went on safari with Micato she was able to help other kids. She felt empowered that she could actually do good in this world and give back, and it made me look at my daughter in a totally different way. It was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, and Micato made that happen.”

The centuries old Kenyan adage, jamii ndiyo msingi wa kila kitu, which means, “Family is the foundation of everything,” is oh, so true. And on safari, with your family, you will know this as never before.

Up Next: Wildlife Spotlight: The African Hippo