Time + Tide Review 2026: Ten Camps in Zambia and Madagascar Scored, Every Rate Listed

Time + Tide scores 63 out of 100 on the 2026 luxury safari operator index, two points below the bar of 65, and is not among the ten listed. It is a family-owned owner-operator with ten properties in two countries: five camps in Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park, three at the Chongwe–Zambezi confluence in the Lower Zambezi, and two in Madagascar, the private island of Miavana and the Tsara Komba lodge on Nosy Komba. Published 2026 rates run from USD 810 a person a night at Chongwe Camp in the green season to USD 1,840 at Chinzombo in the July–October safari season, with a USD 100 a night park-fee-and-levy on top; Miavana is USD 3,700 a person a night all year plus USD 300 in fees and a helicopter. The 2027 sheet is already published and holds every rate flat. Guests rate Chongwe Camp 4.9 from 286 Tripadvisor reviews and Chinzombo 4.8 from 103. What holds the score down is the shape of the portfolio: two countries score 7 of 15 for coverage, the Zambian camps stand inside national parks and a game management area rather than on private land (12 of 20), and the four seasonal bush camps are simple by design (20 of 30 for property). What it does as well as anyone on the index is publish and reinvest: full rates for two years, four rebuilds since 2022, and a Foundation that prints its beneficiary numbers.

The evidence record

Who Time + Tide is

Time + Tide is what three older Zambian businesses became when the Dalais family put them under one name in 2018. The oldest line runs to 1950, when Norman Carr and Paramount Chief Nsefu set up Zambia’s first photographic safari company in the South Luangwa, the valley where the walking safari was invented; Norman Carr Safaris and its camps, Chinzombo, Mchenja, Kakuli, Nsolo and Luwi, are the South Luangwa half of the portfolio. The second line is Chongwe Safaris, founded by the Liebenberg family in 1996 at the point where the Chongwe river meets the Zambezi, now Chongwe Camp, Chongwe Suites and Chongwe House. The third is Miavana, a private-island resort developed between 2013 and 2017 on Nosy Ankao off the north-east coast of Madagascar, to which the Tsara Komba lodge on Nosy Komba was added by acquisition in May 2024. The company’s own timeline is the source for all of this and is unusually complete.

It describes itself, accurately, as “a family run and owned luxury safari and island business”. Thierry Dalais is founder and chairman; the chief executive is Bruce Simpson, whose career, Londolozi, andBeyond, Singita, Wilderness and North Island in the Seychelles, is a tour of the operators this site scores above it. The group is a cluster of six named companies, and the contract a guest signs is governed by the law of Mauritius, with a South African telephone number as the main line and no street address published anywhere on the site. That is not unusual for an Indian Ocean holding structure, but a British or American buyer should know that redress, if it ever came to that, sits in a Mauritian court.

One thing the site does not say: King Lewanika Lodge in Liuwa Plain, marketed for years as Time + Tide King Lewanika and still listed that way by some agents, reopened in August 2026 under Ker & Downey Zambia. Liuwa is no longer in the portfolio, and the ten properties described below are the ten the company itself lists.

The ten properties

Read the table as three products. Chinzombo is the year-round flagship, six tents with private pools by the architects of North Island, and is priced like it. The four bush camps behind it are the real Norman Carr inheritance: four or five rooms each, open for six months, linked on foot along the Luangwa and the Luwi, and priced at USD 840 to 1,200 a night, which is the best published rate for a walking safari of this pedigree that this site has on record. The Lower Zambezi cluster is a different river and a different rhythm, canoeing and tiger-fishing rather than walking, and Chongwe House, rebuilt and reopened in May 2025, took Best Safari House in Africa at the 2026 Safari Awards. Madagascar is a fourth thing entirely: Miavana at USD 3,700 competes with North Island and Benguerra, not with anything in Zambia.

Rates 2026 and 2027, every property

The flat 2027 sheet is the most useful fact on this page for anyone planning eighteen months out. Angama’s 2027 sheet in Kenya rises up to 32% at some properties, Singita and Wilderness reprice annually, and Time + Tide has simply published the same numbers again. Two other things to notice. The safari-season premium at the bush camps is modest, USD 190 to 320 a night, so the July to October walking season is not the financial cliff it is in the Mara; and the Chongwe Suites, at USD 950 to 1,330 with a private guide and vehicle included, are cheaper than adding a private vehicle to a Chongwe Camp booking at USD 570 a night.

What the rate does not include

Worked through for a couple on a classic six-night Zambia circuit in August, three nights at Chinzombo and three at Chongwe Camp on shared vehicles: USD 11,040 plus USD 5,940 in accommodation, USD 1,200 in fees and levy, so USD 18,180 before the Mfuwe–Lusaka–Royal flights, tips and the 4% if paid by card. The same six nights at Luwi, Nsolo and Chongwe Camp, the walking version, come to USD 13,320. In green season the Chinzombo–Chongwe pair is USD 14,040. Those figures sit near the middle of the Zambia safari cost ranges and well under the equivalent week in the Mara or the Okavango, which is the whole argument for Zambia.

Booking terms

These terms are middle of the field for an owner-operator and stricter than a bonded planner’s: the deposit is gone on any cancellation, and the cliff to 100% at 45 days is fifteen days later than the 30-day median on the payment terms index. The 4% card fee is worth avoiding on a USD 18,000 booking; a bank transfer costs less. The practical point is the same as for every unbonded operator on this site: insurance to the full trip value at the moment of deposit, and, for a peak-season booking where the 20% is real money, a bonded planner is the safer route, which is the case made in specialist vs booking direct.

Conservation and the Time + Tide Foundation

The Time + Tide Foundation, established in 2017, is a community foundation before it is a wildlife one, and it publishes the numbers that most safari foundations do not: 570 primary beneficiaries and 8,900 secondary in 2026, more than 19,000 residents reached across 300 villages and 30 schools in Zambia, and 1,300 residents supported directly in Madagascar’s Loky-Manambato protected area with 5,500 indirectly. The programmes are weekly girls’ clubs, student sponsorship, home-based education for children with developmental differences, health support and women’s professional development, alongside biodiversity work. Every property runs on solar. The council is chaired by Mark Carnegie, with the founder Thierry Dalais among its members, and the Foundation took the We Are Africa Empower Africa award in 2026, the Pure Awards community award in 2024 and a Regenerative Travel Impact award for education the same year.

The money comes in through the levy, USD 100 a person a night in Zambia and USD 300 at Miavana, though the site does not itemise how much of the Zambian USD 100 is the national park fee and how much the levy. Where Time + Tide scores 15 of 25 rather than the 20-plus of Great Plains, Tswalu or Singita is on land: it holds no reserve of its own in Zambia, its camps stand inside a national park and a game management area run by the state, and it carries no third-party certification. On Nosy Ankao it has planted more than 100,000 endemic plants and trees across a 10 km² island, which is the closest the group comes to land stewardship in its own name.

What guests and awards say

The guest record is strong where it is deep. Chongwe Camp holds 4.9 from 286 Tripadvisor reviews and is first of seven properties in the Chiawa area; Chinzombo 4.8 from 103, and 98% from 13 reviews on Expert Africa, whose reviews are verified against bookings; Miavana 5.0 from 19. The 2025–26 Chongwe Camp reviews are the useful ones, because they describe the refurbished tents and lounge first-hand. Where the record is thin is at company level: one review on SafariBookings and no Trustpilot profile at all, which is why Time + Tide is a weak entry on the review evidence index despite the property scores.

The awards page is long and, for 2025–26, verifiable against the awarding bodies: Chongwe House was Best Safari House in Africa at the 2026 Safari Awards; Chongwe House, Tsara Komba and Miavana are in Tatler’s 101 Best Hotels 2026; Chongwe Camp, Chinzombo and Miavana were in the Condé Nast Traveller Readers’ Choice Awards 2025; Miavana is on Robb Report’s 2025 list of the greatest luxury hotels and was on the Condé Nast Traveller Gold List in 2024. Further back, the group took Best Walking Safari Experience and Best Guiding Team in Africa at the 2018 Safari Awards, the two titles that matter most for the South Luangwa product. The awards and credentials index weighs these against the field.

The case for, and the case against

What changed in 2025–26

Time + Tide against its peers

A buyer looking at Time + Tide in Zambia is comparing it with the other family owner-operators on the same two rivers, or with a pan-African group that can add Botswana or Zimbabwe to the same booking. Scores are from the safari operator index where the operator has been assessed.

The pattern is the same as it was for Angama in Kenya: Time + Tide wins on the product it controls, the camps, the guides, the rate sheet, and loses index points on the things a two-country family company cannot buy, private land and continental reach. For a first safari that needs the Big Five in a week, that matters. For the specific thing Zambia does, walking between small camps on the Luangwa and canoeing the Zambezi, it matters much less, and the Zambia cost guide treats the owner-operators here as the reference point rather than the exception.

Who should book Time + Tide, and who should not

On how to book: Time + Tide sells direct and through the trade at the same published rate, so a planner costs nothing extra and adds financial protection, the internal flights and the Livingstone or Botswana legs the portfolio lacks. Go2Africa (affiliate link) lists the Zambian camps with a bonded contract; the planners on the safari planner index all sell the South Luangwa. The direct-versus-planner arithmetic is in specialist vs booking direct, and the wider price context in what a safari costs by budget.

Questions readers ask