We went from 8/26 to 9/11/04 with the Hilton tour starting on the 28th of August. We choose to go into Tanzania because we wanted to see the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, and Lake Maynara. They call this time the "bridge" season, because they have the first few rain showers and the area turns green at that time. We saw the first signs of the migrations, but not the millions and millions of animals that you would see in the Masai Mara, but we are still able to spot all the animals we wanted to see. Since this is not the main season in Tanzania we were able to stay at the famous lodges that would have been outside of our budget had we gone in the main season. (For instance, we stayed at the Kirawira Luxury Tented Lodge, certainly one of the nicest places I ever stayed at. In the main season it runs $500 a person/ per night. We paid a small fraction of that...)

The tour operators switch from time to time, but I think Paws got a two or three year contract with Hilton. Don't remember exactly how long our driver told us, but it was somewhere around that.

There has been a lot of speculation that this reward will not be around much longer. When I asked the hotel management about this, they had no indication that this was about to happen. As stated in previous posts, Hilton does indeed no longer own the Salt Lick or Taita Hills Lodge. (Taita Hills is another property that used to be included in the package that is located close by that is closed right now because the number of visitors to Tsavo is very low right now.) The U.S. travel advisory is hurting Kenya badly, and we got a lot of comments about that. Don't know why it is still in effort, we found Kenya and even Nairobi to be rather safe. My guess would be that until tourism improves in the area again, this reward will be around. Once it picks up and they can sell rooms to somebody else, I don't know how long Hilton will keep this...