Many people do not have the luxury of spending 8 nights or going to all 3 lodges. I am going to attempt to contrast and compare our experience at each so that if you want to choose one or two, you can do so. Note that there are seasonal issues particuliarly for Eagle Island Lodge.

Facilities

1. Eagle Island Lodge - rebuilt and reopened Nov 2015. Extraordinary in its beauty and luxury while maintaining a sense of Afria. For example, many of the details in the room were to give the sense of an early explorer setting up his chest in his tent. Plumbing was copper in a nod to Botswana's copper industry. It is so luxurious compared to the other properties it is best saved to the end so that expectations aren't inappropriately set.
2. Khwai River Lodge - identical room design to Savute but more recently renovated
3. Savute Elephant Lodge - a bit shabby. Renovation is planned this year by the same design team as Eagle Island Lodge. Half the rooms will be closed at a time for work.

Animal Sightings

1. Khwai River Lodge - this location is rich in animal sightings, both from the lodge and out on drives. The camp is not in a national park, so guides can drive off road and at night. We saw at least 100 hippos, hundreds of elephants, a few cape buffalo, zebra, giraffe, 3 lions, and one leopard.
2. Savute Elephant Lodge - this area is arid. It is also rich in animal sightings albeit without the hippos we enjoyed so much in Khwai. Savute has one lonely hippo. We saw more giraffe, zebra dn wildebeest here. The zebra and wildebeest migrate and were just in the process of returning.
3. Eagle Island Lodge - this is the best water activites camp in Botswana, but the water was down. The rains were beginning in Angola and it would be 3 months before the water made it south to this area. We were taken out on a mokoro with our guide poling it thru the shallow water our first night. We got stuck on sand bars and saw very little other than water lilies. We were discouraged that we had three nights to spend here. Another group said they had gone out on a drive and hadn't seen much wildlife. But the next day, our fortunes were much better. We had a superb guide and found a lot of animals. One highlight was seeing 5 rhinoceros who had migrated from Chief's Island. This was a first for our guide to see this many. On the last morning, our guide went tracking for cheetahs. He'd stop, check the ground, check trees for scent, and then we came upon 3 half grown cheetahs. We followed them for the better part of an hour. It was magical. We also spent an hour in a helicopter. We saw hundreds of hippos in various streams as well as elephants. This was the only way to get a sense of the delta. The helicopter station at Eagle Island Lodge serves all of the Okavango Delta camps.