About this guide
Who's behind Visit Masai Mara?
One reserve, two managers and a fee that doubles on 1 July, read from Narok County's finance law rather than from a tour operator's rate sheet.
Who writes this
This guide is written by someone who overlanded much of Africa in his own Land Cruiser with a rooftop tent, and for whom the national parks were what stayed. The information about them online was usually missing, wrong or years old: fees from three tariff sheets ago, camps that had closed, roads described by people who had never driven them.
So he started writing it down properly. This guide runs on the authorities' own documents, on climate normals rather than brochure weather, and on what the camps publish themselves, with a date on every claim.
What this site is
An independent guide to the Masai Mara National Reserve, the Mara Triangle and the conservancies around them. It is not the county's site and not the Mara Conservancy's, and several websites that look official are neither. The reserve's own law spells the name Maasai Mara; we use Masai Mara because that is what people search for.
The Mara is a county reserve, not a KWS park, which is why the national tariff and eCitizen do not apply here and why so much of the standard Kenya advice misses.
How it is funded, and what is not for sale
Nothing here is for sale. Listing a camp is free and no position on any page can be bought. Some outbound links earn us a small commission, and that changes neither the order of a list nor a single figure on these pages.
How we handle disputed facts
The entry fees come from the Narok County Finance Act 2023, read directly, and from the Mara Conservancy's published table, which matches it line for line. Where the law is silent, for instance on how guests sleeping inside the reserve are billed, we say so on the page rather than repeating an operator's guess.
Wildlife numbers carry the census or survey they came from and the year it was counted, because several Mara populations are falling and a 2017 figure tells you a different story from a 2024 one. Found something outdated? Tell us and it changes the same week.
Related guides
We publish independent guides to a number of Africa's parks and reserves. In Kenya the Masai Mara sits alongside Amboseli, Tsavo and Samburu; the rest cover Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Botswana and South Africa.