Mitch. Your "on-the-scene" reports are appreciated by those of us who have trips planned. Have you heard anything about how individual outfitters are handling fees with clients? Thanks.

John,
Some have stated that they will refund any deposit to clients that opt to cancel. Others have offered to honor the "old rates" for trophy fees for those hunts that have already occurred or are underway. Some others are asking their clients to "assist" in sharing the resulting increase. Some have no choice but to pass this increase (trophy fees that is) on to the clients.

You see for most of the smaller operators with 1 or 2 blocks and limited funds at their disposal, this is going to hit them even harder because as clients will shoot less, resulting in less utilisation, the outfitters will be forced to pay exorbitant amounts of "top-up" fees for the unutilised quota based on the new rates. They have no option but to pass the increases on to their clients.

Mitch. Thanks a lot. I'll wait and see what is proferred.

Bwanamitch,
Would you please explain how the utilisation quota works?

SBT,
Outfitters are forced to utilise 40% of the total value of KEY SPECIES (this is a list by Game depart of what these species are)in a season. whether this 40% is actually shot by clients or not is irrelevant. So if an outfitter falls short of this 40% value because their clients did not shoot enough, he will need to pay the difference from his pocket. With these new increased fees, the 40% value will be extremely high. we already predict clients will be shooting less animals which means more outfitters are going to fail to attain the 40% and will then need to pay for the outstanding amount from their pocket.

Eg. Some outfitter have a total combined quota from all their blocks of over 40 lions. Up until now, the total value of these lions would be 40 x $2500 (old fee) = $100,000

Today, the same value would be 40 x $12,000 = $480,000

Mitch. Given the scenario which you describe, I can easily see that outfitters would be sorely tempted to abandon less productive concessions altogether. They would be forced to try and consolidate their safaris in fewer areas, just to make ends meet.

The results of this would be bad. Not only would certain areas be overshot, but abandoning areas would leave them wide open to poachers. I've hunted all corners of Tanzania. It has been my observation that areas not actively hunted are quickly overrun by poachers with devastating results. Other than the poachers, I see no winners in this game.