The brand's debut tented camp drops 19 suites into Solio, one of the last great strongholds for black and white rhino.
The JW Marriott Mount Kenya Rhino Reserve Safari Camp has opened inside the Solio Game Reserve in Laikipia, a private 45,000-acre conservancy pinned between the snows of Mount Kenya and the jagged peaks of the Aberdare Range. It is the brand’s first safari camp, and it has chosen its ground shrewdly: Solio is one of Africa’s most successful rhino sanctuaries, home to one of the continent’s largest populations of both black and white rhino.
Accommodation runs to 19 tented suites – one of them a two-bedroom – and none of them involves roughing it. Each has an outdoor living area on a private deck, a plunge pool, and roll-up canvas walls that dissolve the line between your sofa and the savannah at the pull of a strap.
Beyond the tents there is a signature restaurant, open-air dining, a Map Room for plotting the day’s drives, a library and games room, and a boutique stocked with locally made pieces. The kitchen leans garden-led, and the Spa by JW quietly handles the part of safari nobody mentions – the aching back after a day in a Land Cruiser – with restorative treatments drawn from the surrounding landscape.
The wildlife does the rest. Expert-led game drives run day and night: daylight brings rhino, leopard, lion, waterbuck, zebra and Thomson’s gazelle, while after dark the cast turns stranger, with spotted hyena and the rarely seen serval and caracal slipping through the spotlight beams. Walking safaris, cycling excursions and birding fill the gaps, and a visit to the reserve’s rhino orphanage keeps the conservation story front and centre. Photographers are handed Canon kit and a resident pro to make sure the once-in-a-lifetime shot actually lands.
The camp runs on an all-inclusive basis, and the genuine novelty is that, unlike almost every rival camp, you can book it with Marriott Bonvoy points. For once, the loyalty stash stretches all the way to rhino country.