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Africa’s best hotels are not simply five-star; they are places you cannot replicate anywhere else on earth. A suite above the Okavango floodplain, a riad in a royal garden, a villa on a private Indian Ocean island. This list of the best 5-star hotels in Africa is drawn from the properties our travel designers book, visit and return to, ranked not by thread count but by the experiences no other continent can offer.

A family safari is one of the few holidays that genuinely changes how children see the world. It is also one of the easiest to get wrong. Book the wrong reserve and you will spend your evenings worrying about malaria tablets; book the wrong lodge and your eight-year-old will be turned away from the game drive vehicle. This guide covers how to plan a family safari around the five decisions that matter most: the best age to go, where safety and malaria shape the choice, which country fits your family, when to book, and how to recognise a truly child-friendly safari lodge.

A medical retreat is not a holiday with a spa attached. Demand has never been higher: wellness tourism grew 13.8% last year according to the Global Wellness Institute, and the medical end of it, the doctor-led clinic stay, is growing fastest of all. The best clinics in Europe run diagnostic programmes that rival private hospitals, set in surroundings that rival the finest hotels, and what you get out of a medical wellness holiday depends almost entirely on what you do before you arrive. Treat the ten steps below as your medical spa checklist; they are the things we ask every client to consider before we confirm a booking.