The Ascot Private experience.

Your first enquiry goes to a Journey Architect, a member of our team in Cape Town or Nairobi with more than 10 years in private African travel. You talk to a person, not a call centre. They have been to the lodges, courses and airstrips you are thinking about.

The first call is about you. Who is travelling. Whether golf is the point of the trip or a round here and there. Which landscapes you have always wanted to see. Whether you have been to Africa before, and what you would do differently this time.

There is no time limit. Some of our first calls have run to three hours, and that is fine with us.

Your Journey Architect builds the itinerary from scratch: the route, the aircraft for each leg, the order of the airstrips, the hotels and lodges, the courses and tee times, the vehicles and guides at each stop, and the hours in between that most itineraries leave empty.

Scott reads every itinerary before you see it. If a lodge has slipped this season, or a route misses something, or a course deserves a second day, he changes it. You get the itinerary when it is right, not when a deadline says so.

Then you change whatever you like, as many times as you need. Revisions cost nothing, and nobody will push you to sign before you are happy.

A box arrives at your door 30 days before you leave. Inside:

• Your printed, bound itinerary, with every day, lodge and flight set out. Something you can write on and carry with you.
• Ascot Private luggage built for the bush, monogrammed where we can.
• Leather luggage tags with your name in gold foil.
• A gift chosen for the places you are going.
• A note from your Journey Architect.

From then on your Journey Architect is on call at any hour. Flights, packing, visas, where to eat in Cape Town before you head north. Ask anything.

You are met at the aircraft by your host, whether you are leaving from Cape Town International, from OR Tambo, or from a regional airport after a long-haul flight from New York or Dubai.

You meet your pilot before you board. Our pilots know Africa from the air. They will point out a waterhole from 2,000 feet and tell you which camp sits above it. When they fly a low pass over a bush strip to move the buffalo off it, they know it is your first sighting of the trip.

The journey pages and Where We Fly cover the places. These things stay the same wherever you go:

• You move between lodges and courses by private aircraft or helicopter. Where a road makes more sense, the vehicle on it is yours.
• Your game vehicle and guide are yours at every lodge. Stop when you want, and stay with a sighting as long as it holds you.
• In the cities you stay in the best hotel for the trip. In the bush, many of our lodges and villas are booked for your party alone. Where they are not, your vehicle, your guide and your table still are.
• Your Journey Architect is a message away throughout. If the weather turns, the animals move, or you want a second day on a course, we change the plan.

About 30 days after you get home, a parcel arrives: a printed book of your journey. It is a proper book, professionally printed, made from the photographs taken along the way by your guide, your pilot or, where we can arrange it, a photographer we send with you. Each picture is captioned, and there is a note from Scott inside.

It is the sort of book that stays on the coffee table and gets taken down whenever someone asks where you went.