This editorial policy sets out how Botswana Travel Guide decides what to publish, which sources it trusts, and what it will never do. A guide is only worth reading if you know how it was built — and Botswana is a country where official information frequently contradicts itself.
Our source hierarchy
We work outwards from the most authoritative source available, and name every source at the foot of the page.
- Statutory and governmental first. The Government of Botswana, the Department of Wildlife and National Parks, the Botswana Unified Revenue Service, Statistics Botswana, and the legislation itself on access, fees and permits.
- Official tourism and treaty bodies next. The Botswana Tourism Organisation, SANParks for the shared Kgalagadi, UNESCO for the Okavango Delta listing, and Ramsar for the wetland.
- Peer-reviewed literature for wildlife, ecology, hydrology and conservation economics, cited by journal and year.
- Reputable reporting and specialist sources for what officialdom does not cover, always identified as what they are.
An operator’s own marketing sits at the bottom: we use it to establish that a camp exists and where, and for nothing else. A claim repeated across a dozen blogs is not corroborated; it is usually one unsourced claim with a long tail.
What this editorial policy will never allow
- Inventing prices, availability, ratings or opening hours. We publish no rates, no availability, no star ratings and no review scores of our own. Where a gate time or fee is not officially confirmed, we say so rather than supply a plausible one.
- Claiming first-hand visits. We have not been to the places we write about, we say so on our about page, and never imply otherwise.
- Copying tourism-board or operator text. Official copy is a source to be read, cited and often questioned, never a paragraph to be lifted.
- Using AI filler to inflate word counts. Padding buries the two sentences a reader actually needed. A page ends when it has said what it has to say.
- Selling inclusion. Commission never buys a mention, prominence or a kind adjective; see our affiliate disclosure.
How we handle conflicting sources
Sources on Botswana conflict often, frequently two official ones with each other. We do not silently pick the more convenient: we set out what each says, attribute both, and name the authority that can settle it.
The Botswana Tourism Organisation’s ports-of-entry table still describes a Kazungula ferry, although the bridge and one-stop border post opened in May 2021. We report the bridge, flag the page as partly outdated, and treat its opening hours as unverified rather than reproducing them.
Volatile operational information
We keep an internal register of facts with a known shelf life — park and vehicle fees, border post hours, road and gate status, concession operators, flight routes and seasonal closures — and re-check them on a schedule, not when somebody complains. They are date-stamped where they appear and carry an instruction to confirm before travelling: the gap between our last check and your arrival is time in which a fee can change or a gate can close. Our corrections policy covers what happens when one goes stale.
Safety-relevant information: the Kgalagadi convoy rule
Where a fact bears on physical safety, we state the uncertainty rather than resolve it by guessing. False confidence is more dangerous than an admitted gap.
The Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park convoy requirement is the clearest case. The Botswana Tourism Organisation states that self-drive campers must travel in a convoy of at least two properly equipped 4×4 vehicles, and SANParks likewise gives no fewer than two vehicles on the Botswana side. A specialist self-drive source contradicts both, holding a single vehicle fine for ordinary camping in Mabuasehube and the two-vehicle minimum applicable only to the pre-booked Wilderness Trails.
We cannot tell you which is right, so we do not pretend to. Wrong one way means a turned-back vehicle at a remote gate after a very long drive; wrong the other means being alone and unrecoverable in one of the emptiest parts of southern Africa. We publish both positions and say plainly that a second vehicle is the prudent default either way — the pattern for every safety-relevant contradiction here.
Communities and cultural sites
People who live in these places are not scenery. We write about villages and community trusts as living concerns with their own economics — the Chobe Enclave after the hunting moratorium — not as holiday backdrops.
- Ask before photographing people, accept a refusal, and never treat payment as consent.
- Guides, trackers and polers are professionals, not part of the exhibit. We describe their skill, never their appearance.
- Sites such as Tsodilo are sacred and legally protected. We publish the access rules and the reasons for them, never advice for getting around either.
- We avoid calling communities authentic or timeless — words that do work for marketing and none for a reader.
Images
An image is a factual claim. We use only licensed images, and caption what is actually shown.
We never label a generic African wildlife photograph as Botswana. A lion is not a Chobe lion because it sits on a Chobe page, and a stock red dune is not the Makgadikgadi. If we cannot establish where an image was taken, we caption it honestly as illustrative or do not run it. Season and species follow the same rule.
Corrections and questions go through the contact page. See also destinations, travel planning and accommodation.