Another tricky location for the company is Kruger National Park, where it runs two camps in South Africa, near the Mozambique border. There, Singita is charging about US$262 per test to help cover a driver making a four-hour loop to get the samples to a lab.
“We have guests checking in on different days, and now you have to send someone back and forth every second day to take the sample to the laboratory,” Bailes says. “If you add it up over six months, you can imagine this is an exorbitant and unforeseen cost.”
As a result, the company is now helping to foot the bill for the construction of a new lab near its properties, to be used both by locals and guests.
Guests could potentially defray costs by packing home-test kits. American travelers, for instance, could use the FDA emergency-use-authorized BinaxNOW COVID-19 Ag Card 2 Home Test, which sells for US$150 for a pack of six tests, or the Ellume Covid-19 Home Test, priced at US$45 per test.
Not all tests by those companies are FDA approved, and there is plenty of fine print on how to use the ones that are. Notably, they must include a telehealth video call—someone observing the test—which requires at least a good internet connection. (That can be challenging on safari, for instance.)
There’s also legwork involved, since the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires that any test “be authorized for use by the relevant national authority” in the country where you are administering it.
There’s also no guarantee that local governments will accept them for entry or onward travel, so they have the potential to solve only for tests required to reenter the U.S., unless you’re very lucky.
This is why even those who deal with more straightforward logistics have found the costs of PCR testing to be prohibitive for some travelers.
Take Deborah Gellis, also a travel adviser at Embark. A couple she’s working with was planning a similarly now-or-never vacation to southern Africa, connecting South Africa, Zambia, Botswana, and the Seychelles in a span of roughly two weeks.
“They have their hearts set on staying at all these places since they are close to each other,” Gellis explains, adding that the pair is hoping to have a baby in the next year and, as she says: “Who knows when they will be back?”
But each time the couple crosses a national border they’ll need new PCR tests, ranging from US$175 to US$340 per person, a cost exceeding US$2 000 over the course of the trip. Gellis says they’re considering abandoning their entire plan—proof that for the lodges on their itinerary, there are many barriers to economic recovery.
Some companies are willing to absorb the cost of Covid-19 testing as a means of getting back to business faster.
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