Premier Tours

Premier Tours runs on a foundation that most travel operators don't have: institutional memory built by a single family over three decades, with each generation adding its own depth of experience. The company was built by Julian Harrison, a South African native who spent formative years working with the South African Tourism Board, guiding foreign journalists through wildlife areas and hosting a radio show on tourism and conservation. That background wasn't casual exposure. It was boots-on-the-ground work learning how African landscapes function, how to move people through complex logistics, and what separates a competent operation from one that anticipates problems before they arrive.

Julian's son Christian has been to Africa nearly every year since he was two years old. That's not a marketing line. It means three decades of incremental, seasonal knowledge about how different regions perform at different times of year, which lodges have changed management and which still have the same head guide they did ten years ago, how airports handle baggage, where the real restaurants are in Livingstone, and the texture of African travel that you only get from returning to the same places repeatedly across your lifetime. Christian is now the company's Africa and Indian Ocean expert, bringing that multi-year history to every consultation. The company's third principal expert, Allie E. Almario, brings over 35 years of adventure travel expertise across all seven continents, adding additional depth to the South America and Galapagos operations.

What this team composition means in practical terms is that when you book with Premier Tours, you're not working with a hired employee following a script. You're working with people who have substantial personal capital invested in getting your trip right. Julian built this company three decades ago. Christian grew up in it. They don't outsource the consultation or hand off your itinerary to someone who's never met you. Your trip gets thought through by someone who's spent years learning the territory and has a reputation to maintain within a small family enterprise.

Premier Tours has maintained its presence and reputation through sustained recognition from the highest-tier travel publications. Condé Nast Traveler has named them one of North America's top travel specialists for every year from 2001 through 2024. That's nearly a quarter-century of continuous recognition. It's not handed out casually. It signals consistency, client satisfaction, and staying power through multiple economic cycles and shifts in travel patterns. In an industry where new operators launch constantly and many disappear just as quickly, that 23-year streak of peer recognition counts.

The company focuses exclusively on two geographic regions: Africa and the Indian Ocean, plus South America and Galapagos. This is not accidental. It's a deliberate choice to own depth over breadth. Rather than position as a full-service global travel company with Africa as one option among many, they've built their reputation in the territories they actually know well. Across Africa, they cover thirteen countries: Botswana, South Africa, Tanzania, Namibia, Mozambique, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and the Indian Ocean islands including Seychelles, Maldives, and Zanzibar.

The types of safaris they design reflect the family's values. They specialize in multi-generational trips, understanding that traveling with teenagers and grandparents requires different logistics and considerations than a couples' honeymoon. They do luxury expeditions and adventure travel. They build honeymoon itineraries tailored to what you actually want, not what a luxury resort package decides is romantic. They work with families at every life stage and have the experience to know what works when children are young versus when they're old enough to appreciate wildlife.

Within their partnerships, Premier Tours has connections to several anchor properties that signal their positioning. They work with Wilderness Linkwasha in Zimbabwe, Tawana in Botswana, and Selinda Camp in Botswana. These are not budget options. Selinda, for instance, is a 12-suite luxury camp in a private concession of the Okavango Delta with a strong reputation for wildlife viewing and fishing, and the fact that Premier Tours has a working relationship with it suggests their clients are operating in the upper-end market. This is borne out by their client base: they're not mass-market operators looking for volume.

The operational philosophy is personalization wedded to expertise. As they state it themselves, they "attentively listen to our travelers' desires, crafting bespoke itineraries that reflect their individual interests." That sounds like something any operator would say. What makes it real at Premier Tours is the fact that when your consultation is with someone who's been to Africa dozens of times, who has family money and time invested in the business, and who has an actual reputation to maintain, that promise carries weight. They're not assembling itineraries from a menu of available packages. They're designing trips from a foundation of personal experience and direct relationships.

The company's structure as a small, tightly held family business has trade-offs. They don't have the infrastructure of a larger operator. You won't find 24-hour support lines or massive back-office staff. What you get instead is responsiveness from people who are invested in the outcome. If something goes wrong mid-trip, you're not calling a support center. You're reaching people who have traveled these routes themselves and will move to solve it. The contact information is direct: a Philadelphia phone line, individual names, and email access to people who care about the result.

The pricing is not promotional. This is not a business built on loss-leader discounts or promotional volumes. It's consulting service where you're paying for decades of experience and personal attention. The expectation is that you're working with a small, selective operator and that the value is in expertise and customization, not in price competition with mass-market providers.

Premier Tours is for travelers who want their African safari consultation to be with someone who has genuine, decades-deep personal experience in the region, who has family legacy invested in getting it right, and who is willing to spend time building a custom itinerary rather than selling you a package. It's for multi-generational trips where the logistics need to accommodate different comfort levels and interests. It's for travelers who value sustained recognition and publication credibility as signals of reliability. And it's for anyone who thinks that a thirty-year-old company run by the same family that founded it is more trustworthy than the latest venture-funded booking platform.