Morocco Desert Tours

Correction: "translate the review into Romanian" → "Translate the review into Romanian."

Sahara Desert Kingdom is a licensed tour operator based in Marrakech, organising private trips to the Sahara. The team is small and built around a founder who still acts as a guide himself. It offers desert tours, mountain treks and bespoke itineraries linking the major cities. Its speciality is the route that sets off from Marrakech, crosses the High Atlas and reaches the dunes of Merzouga.

Morocco has no shortage of desert tour operators, and most of them simply fill a minibus and set off. Sahara Desert Kingdom takes a different approach: private tours with a driver-guide, dates chosen by you and an itinerary tailored to the people in the car. It's like the difference between an off-the-peg suit and one that a tailor fits to the customer's measurements with a needle.

So, what's on the menu?

The core offering is the desert loop departing from Marrakech. The three-day option ends with one night in a hotel and one in a camp. The four-day circular tour, which the website calls 'The Four Valleys', allows more time to explore the Dades and Todra Gorges. A five-day itinerary follows the same route but ends in Fez.

The longer tours cover a wider area. The list includes a desert tour from Fez to Marrakech, a route from Marrakech to Chefchaouen and a 14-day tour covering most of the country. Tours depart from Marrakech, Casablanca or Fes, and other pick-up points can be arranged on request.

What do you do on those days? The usual route passes through the Tizi n'Tichka Pass and stops at the Ait Ben Haddou kasbah. It travels through the Dades and Todra Gorges, then ends the second day on a camel ride at sunset towards the Erg Chebbi dunes. The night is spent in a desert camp; the company runs what it calls 'luxury camps', as well as simpler communal camps near Merzouga.

The website lets the landscape do the hard work. It speaks of flat-topped red mountains, river valleys, waterfalls and lakes, ancient kasbahs and the sort of tranquillity you find only amongst the dunes, with no roads for kilometres on end. Anyone who has sat on the sand at night knows that the silence is an attraction in itself.

Trekking is the other half of the business, and here the list becomes more unusual. The main trek lasts five days and four nights in the Saghro Mountains. It sets off on foot from Nkob and winds its way through village oases with almond and date palms, with nights spent in camps. The area is home to the Ait Atta tribe, and most visitors are only familiar with Toubkal, so a route through the Saghro shows that this operator has gone beyond the obvious.

How the private tour format works

The blog offers a simple explanation of private tours, and the logic is clear. There are no fixed departure dates, so the traveller chooses the day and duration of the trip. The guide is local, and the stay at the camp in Merzouga is within a community. The camel ride and the sunset are included in the day's programme.

Tailor-made packages take things a step further. The website states that a tour can be tailored to your needs, interests and budget, so you tell the team what you want to see and they'll map out the itinerary. Would a family with young children want the same pace as two friends going on a trek? Probably not, and that's precisely the point of the format.

Who books this sort of thing? The company lists families, business people, school groups and older tourists. The quotes on the homepage mention meals adapted for special diets. The ten-day tours through Marrakech, the Dades Valley, the Sahara, Fes, Chefchaouen, Rabat and Casablanca feature in reviews on several occasions.

The blog is also aimed at those who have left their planning until the last minute. The argument is that an organised trip takes the stress out of a short visit, as transport and accommodation are sorted before you even land. The team describes itself as made up of people who love their country and know its history and geography inside out. It sounds like the standard pitch of a local operator, and customer reviews tend to echo this.

Beyond the desert, there are day trips and city tours. Local guides cover the imperial cities, the medina of Fez, the nightlife of Marrakech and artisans at work, in both towns and villages. On TripAdvisor, the company is categorised under 4x4 and off-road tours, heritage tours and day trips, which matches its website.

The small details that aren't quite so small

Sahara Desert Kingdom is a registered Moroccan company, and the website states that it is a fully licensed tour operator. It also makes three promises: no hidden costs, clean and comfortable hotels and riads at every stage, plus a satisfaction guarantee. As a reviewer, I can only note that these are stated on the website. Customer reviews are where you'd check them out.

Those reviews are easy to find, as the website links directly to TripAdvisor and there's also a page on Trustpilot. Customers tend to mention their guides, and the founder, Idir Najimi, crops up time and again, alongside a colleague called Hammou. It's a useful indication in a line of work where you often never find out who's going to be leading you.

The blog is practical, with articles that a traveller would actually find useful. Recent posts cover what to see between Marrakech and Chefchaouen, Morocco's main airports, travelling with children and Moroccan weddings. There is a frequently asked questions page, and a 'become a local guide' link in the footer suggests that the company recruits its guides from the regions it operates in. In my opinion, this is the most telling detail on the whole site.

The website itself is easy to navigate. It has a language selector, a booking button on the homepage and links to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest. Enquiries for bespoke tours are made via the contact form, and the team says they accept requests for routes and pick-up points that aren't on the standard list.

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