Three safaris is the minimum, and the arithmetic is brutal
A tiger sighting is a probability, not a booking. Parks are large, the animals are wild, and nobody controls the outcome of a given drive.
Which means two safaris is not a sample. It is a coin toss you have flown a very long way to take.
Three drives over two full days is the realistic minimum. Four or five over three days is where people stop being anxious and start enjoying the forest, which is the actual shift worth paying for — because the moment you are no longer desperate for the tiger, you start seeing everything else. Langur alarm calls moving through the canopy ahead of something. A sloth bear crossing a track. Sambar standing very still for a reason.
Two other things that move the odds more than the park does. The zone you are allotted, which is a permit question handled months in advance. And the naturalist, who is the difference between driving around a forest and reading one.
If a trip gives a park one night and one drive, that is not a wildlife trip. That is a photograph of a jeep.
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