Nineteen people, one telephone number.
Nairobi, since 2016. We do not have offices abroad, and we think that is the point.
Twenty-four people, since 2016. We have slept in every camp we sell, and we will tell you which ones we would not.
It began as a favour, and then people kept asking
AETHER was founded in 2016 by a Nairobi-raised guide and a former camp manager who had spent a decade watching guests arrive on itineraries written by people who had never been to the places on them. They started by planning journeys for friends, refused to work from a catalogue, and were fully booked within two seasons.
Ten years on we are nineteen people in one building in Karen: five specialists who write journeys, nine guides who drive them, three in the concierge room and two who do nothing but visit camps. We have deliberately not opened an office in London or New York. Everyone who advises you is on the ground, in the season, in the country you are asking about.
We remain small on purpose. A specialist who is writing forty journeys a year can hold all of them in their head; one writing four hundred cannot, and you can feel the difference on the third morning of a trip.
19
People, all in Nairobi
41
Camps on our list — visited, not brochured
68%
Of guests travel with us again
2h
Median first reply to an enquiry
Five things we will not trade
We sell only what we have slept in
Every property on our list has been stayed in by a member of this office within the last eighteen months. If it has changed hands or changed chefs, we go back before we sell it again.
One specialist, start to finish
The person who takes your first call writes your itinerary, answers your questions at eleven at night and reads your feedback when you are home. No handovers, no account managers.
Honest advice over an easy sale
We will tell you when the month you have chosen is the wrong one, when a country would suit you better than the one you asked for, and when your budget will not buy the trip you are imagining.
The land must pay for itself
Every journey carries a conservancy levy paid directly to the landowners whose grazing becomes habitat. It is not optional, and it is itemised on your invoice.
Our guides are employed, not contracted
Nine guides on salary, with pension, insurance and paid low season. It is why they are still here after nine years, and why they behave like hosts rather than drivers.
We answer the telephone
A Nairobi number, staffed by a person who can move a flight, at any hour of any night your journey is running. Not a call centre, not a chatbot, not an email address.
The specialists
Wanjiru Kamau
Founder · Kenya, Tanzania
Nairobi-raised, KPSGA Silver, twenty-one years guiding before she started writing journeys. Knows the Mara conservancies lease by lease.
Tomás Herrera
Photographic & walking
Former wildlife photographer. Plans by light rather than by distance, and will argue with you about lenses if invited.
Achieng’ Otieno
Families & multi-generation
Mother of three, all of whom have been on safari since they were six. Knows which camps mean it when they say child-friendly.
Elias Ndegwa
Southern Africa & rail
Eleven years in Botswana before joining us. Handles the journeys that cross more than two borders.
The land pays for itself, or it is sold. That is the whole argument.
Kenya’s wildlife lives mostly outside its national parks, on land owned by Maasai, Samburu and Laikipiak families who can lease it for grazing, sell it for wheat, or lease it as habitat. Tourism decides which. Every night you spend on a conservancy is a payment into that calculation, and we make sure the payment reaches the landowner rather than an intermediary.
In 2025 AETHER guests generated USD 412,000 in direct conservancy levies across eleven conservancies — lease payments to 1,340 landowning households, forty-one ranger salaries, two mobile veterinary units and the schooling costs of ninety-six children in the Naboisho catchment. The figures are audited annually and published in full.
$412k
Direct conservancy levies, 2025
1,340
Landowning households paid
41
Ranger salaries funded
96
Children in school on levy funds
“Three days before we flew, our camp lost its water. They had us moved, re-routed and told before we had heard about it — and the replacement was better.”