Ladies and Gents,

Just a heads up about any hunting plans you might have in Southern Africa in 2013.

With the global rise in fuel prices, day fees and transfer fees in Southern Africa will HAVE to increase drasticaly from now untill next year.

This rise impacts on everything. Higher fuel prices means higher food prices means higher salaries, means.......it's a "oily" snowball!


If you have serious plans of going, try and tie in bookings now at 2012 rates. I am no dooms day profit, but we HAD to increase our dayly rates quite a bit to accommodate this madness. I am sure every other Outfitter/PH out there feels it as well.

Good hunting!

When last did you put fuel in? The pumps around are running dry! The damn truck drivers on strike and now they want to pull in the dock workers and the airport mob as well. Flippen stuff-up of note. Supermarket shelves are starting to look more than a little bare in some parts.

looked fuel prices up and i found 11.62 rand per liter

Rand is $8.826 to $1.00 us

Found for South Africa ... 1 gallon of fuel is $43.98 Rand or $4.98 USD ... about what we are paying on the USA west for diesel and or gas.

Charl, I am curious, do you price your hunts based on Rand or US Dollars? With the US Dollar improving against the Rand isn’t that enough to cover the increasing costs for fuel and food in RSA? If your clients are paying in Dollars, you are ahead of where you were 6 months ago.

damn good question and it applies across southern Africa. every outfitter i have ever heard of in southern Africa prices their hunts in dollars. with a climbing exchange rate, they will be getting more local currency for the dollars paid. example- $5000 hunt at 7.5 rand/dollar equals less local currency than a $5000 hunts at 8.5 rand/dollars. cost of goods in local currency goes up but climbing exchange rate offsets it.

Bwana 338: Just for what it is worth. If the Rand is 8.8 I will be lucky to see 8.4 in my account when the bank is done with me. But it is a small matter and do not change the maths that much. I know what the fuel cost is down your way, but you can realy not compare the two countries, and going down that road trying to justify this statement is going to be a looooong one


Folks, the US dollar is around the R8 mark since January last year. Before that we saw fluctuating exchange rates from as low as six, but with an average rate of R7.00/$1.00

It does not help to look at the exchange rate as it stood for the last year, you need to look at an average of three years and work according to that. Too many outfitters booked very expensive DG hunts just to get bitten in the ass by a volatile economic climate.

I did price my whole business in Rands for the 2008 season. It was a BIG mistake. Clients wants to see what they pay for the hunt in their own currency, period.

In all honesty, if you come up to date with the figures on the international hunting industry in S.A. you will realise the rope we are walking on is very, very tight.

Example:

Roughly 1,000 full time PH/Outfitters per year visit S.A. Only 8,500 on avg. hunting tourists. That leaves a mean avg. of 8,5 clients per year per outfit. Then bring in the companies that do 60-100 clients a year, and us medium boys doing 30-40 hunters per year, then you will quickly see it is a very small and very competitive market. What does this have to do with the fuel price?

I cannot make my company smaller. I need the same amount of vehicles, the same amount of staff, using the same amount of fuel every month, 12 months of the year to make a living. If I make it smaller, I cannot accommodate the same amount of hunters to the standard they are used to. I tried it at the start of this year and it did not work. That is when outfitters go down the part time road, and get a second income.

The part timers can cope with all the above, as he runs a double cab pick up from his house in town, and have no running cost as far as his "business" goes. If the fuel price hikes, he just charges the outfitter/client $20.00 per day more.

This post served as a warning after I spoke to a lot of my colleuges. Avg day fee for SA hunts is going from $400-$500.00, I am sure of that. If not, the trophy fees will increase. It has to, or else we cannot make a living, it is as simple as that.

Please take note that I did not post this as a statement for Infinito Safaris, but rather for people in general looking at booking with ANY Safari company for 2013. My advise is to try and lock them in on this years prices for next year!

In good hunting,

It is already almost impossible to make a living as a PG PH in South Africa if that is your only source of income and you are not a landowner/large outfitter

Prices should have gone up long, long ago......

It appears that the rule of safari pricing is as follows:

US dollar down vs. Rand = Safari prices go up.
US dollar up vs. Rand = Safari prices go up.
US dollar stable vs. Rand = Safari prices go up.

After being on 8 trips to RSA and Zim the one thing that I observed in every camp was the amount of local staff. The number of people employed sure seemed excessive. That would be the first place I'd look to save some $$ if I were running a safari camp.

Charl

I was just looking at the current exchange rate on computer.

I have also understood that you get hit big time by the banks to exchange USD to Rands.

It would have been helpful if you provided the Strike by truck driver asking for a 22% pay increase that is crippling the nation and the mine strikers that have been on intermittent strike for months.

well join the crowd, U.S. hunters are having a tough time making ends meet also, due to government, fuel, insurance and medical costs rising rapidly. These are worldwide problems which mean fewer hunters are going to far away places to hunt

Charl, OK, OK....I'll up my offer to $3,500 for the 10-day Buff hunt :-)

quote:

Originally posted by Biebs:
Charl, OK, OK....I'll up my offer to $3,500 for the 10-day Buff hunt :-)

Go $3500:50

Bwana338, some of the miners are demanding increases of 250%, in hand, and the hell with any deductions or taxes.

quote:

Originally posted by Scriptus:
some of the miners are demanding increases of 250%, in hand, and the hell with any deductions or taxes.

So we can soon expect the Sa Rand to go the same way as the Zim dollar! and maybe we should blame that on the evil white colonialists!

As regards fuel, we're paying the equivalent of R20 per litre here in Portugal & I believe it's even more in the UK.

Hey Charl,

Don't raise prices...just walk more. Both you and I could stand to lose a few pounds anyway. Just to let you know gas is hitting $6 @ gallon in some parts of California.

Cheers,

BBC

quote:

Originally posted by shakari:

quote:

Originally posted by Scriptus:
some of the miners are demanding increases of 250%, in hand, and the hell with any deductions or taxes.

So we can soon expect the Sa Rand to go the same way as the Zim dollar! and maybe we should blame that on the evil white colonialists!

As regards fuel, we're paying the equivalent of R20 per litre here in Portugal & I believe it's even more in the UK.

R8:61 to the greenback on Friday. It looks like my November trip is getting trimmed to the bone. Damned colonialists. Somebody please help the Afro Socialists. The cost of fuel is a bit of a problem, but with the trucker's strike, there is none to be had and the ATMs have run out of cash. Every day in Africa is a challenge.
The ruling twats in Pretoria want to change all the street names, suburbs and even the name of Pretoria so "white" names do not exist at an estimated cost of ZAR250 Million. Non-racist constitution, my arse!

ZAR8.80 to the greenback and fuel not available at a number of service stations. Strikes set to spread.

quote:

Originally posted by BigBoreCore:
Hey Charl,

Don't raise prices...just walk more. Both you and I could stand to lose a few pounds anyway. Just to let you know gas is hitting $6 @ gallon in some parts of California.

Cheers,

BBC

Here in Norway we pay 2,5 USD per liter. And we have shitloads of oil. But we sell it cheap to the US and pay more ourselves

And our pipeline oil goes to Japan....go figure :-)

Back in 1995 when the dollar hit 10+ against the Rand, many outfitters quickly converted to the dollar when quoting hunts. Land owners were quick to pick up on this causing prices to ratchet up even faster. Unfortunately, prices seldom ratchet down with an improving Rand.

The good news is, everything in life is negotiable and US hunters are not exactly flooding the market in Africa these days...

Here in the uk we are around the 21-22 rand per litre for fuel. And it really does make short hunts a struggle to make viable. However with any hunt that is not 1x1 then the impact is minimised especially over several days at a single location.

Over the years I think that margins on the day rates have been squeezed in RSA but that's no bad thing in my book. It stops encouraging the fast buck brigade and fly by night ph's into the market. There is still a decent margin to be made and of course day rates are not the only source of revenue from a hunt. Fuel prices are impacting but the biggest impact for the client is the movement in game prices over the last few years and the cost of air travel.

We factor in about $30 per day for vehicle use in a day rate of $350 or $300 in a luxury lodge so it is a relatively small component of the over all package.

K