Fly-in safaris hop between parks on light aircraft — 45 minutes to an hour per leg instead of a 4-8 hour drive — and land you inside or minutes from your camp on a bush airstrip. Road safaris cover the same ground by 4x4, with the drive time itself functioning as a rolling game drive through changing landscape, at roughly a third of the transport cost. Choose fly-in when your trip covers three or more parks, when time is genuinely tight (a 7-day trip loses a full travel day each way you drive between the Serengeti and Ngorongoro, for instance), or when comfort and minimizing fatigue matter more than budget. Choose road when your itinerary is two parks or fewer that are reasonably close together (Serengeti-Ngorongoro-Tarangire forms a natural road circuit in Tanzania; Nairobi-Amboseli-Mara less so), when you want the additional wildlife-viewing opportunity the drive itself provides, or when budget is the deciding factor — road transfers typically save 40-60 percent versus the equivalent flight sector. Many of our itineraries mix both deliberately: road for the tight circuits, fly-in for the long jumps.