How do I handle dietary requirements and accessibility?

What we tell planners

Dietary and accessibility are rooming-list fields, not a week-before email. Incentive houses should collect: legal name, nationality, diet (including religious, clinical allergy, and ‘preference’ labelled as preference), mobility and walking honesty, CPAP or other medical devices, and who cannot do stairs, boats or a gorilla hour. We need this early enough to brief lodge kitchens, light-aircraft weight, and whether a guest should be on the non-trek or non-climb twin track.

What East Africa can actually do: five-star lodges and Mauritius/Seychelles/Nairobi/Addis hotels handle complex diets when they are named. Camp kitchens handle most allergies if they are not surprised. Crater picnics, balloon mornings, dhows and catamarans are a different hygiene and service model — we plan them, we do not pretend they are a hotel restaurant. Vegetarian, vegan, halal and kosher-style requests are a planning conversation; kosher certification is not sitting in every Serengeti camp.

Accessibility is honesty. Many safari vehicles, crater descents, gorilla trails, Simien walks, Stone Town streets and island boats are not step-free. Some lodges have ground-floor rooms; many tented camps do not. Wheelchair programmes belong in city hotels and selected Mauritius resorts, not on a Volcanoes trail. We will design a parallel morning for a guest who should not trek. We will not sell a ‘fully accessible safari’ that is a lie. Put the constraint in the qualification FAQ so the field does not discover it in Kigali.