Ask anyone who has trekked to Mountain Gorillas in Uganda during the wet season and they will tell you something that surprises people: it was better than they expected. Sometimes they say it was the best thing they have ever done. The forest is impossibly green. The air is cool and sharp. The trails are quieter. And the Gorillas unbothered by crowds, unhurried in their morning routines, tend to stay lower on the mountain, closer to where the vegetation is thick and the food is easy, which means the trek to reach them is often shorter than it would be in August.
Then ask how full the lodges were during that same visit, and the answer changes entirely.
Uganda’s low season, the wet months of April, May, and November, is one of the best-kept secrets in African wildlife travel. It is also, according to official government data released this year, one of the most underperforming revenue windows in the entire national tourism economy.
The Ministry of Tourism, Wildlife and Antiquities published its Statistical Abstract 2025 in April 2026, and buried within its conservation chapter is a number that should be keeping Uganda’s tourism strategists awake at night: Gorilla permit utilisation in April sits at just 20%.
Put plainly, eight out of every ten available gorilla permits in that month go unsold. The slots expire. The Uganda Wildlife Authority collects a fraction of what the conservation budget needs. And the forest, full of Gorillas, is full of atmosphere, genuinely beautiful, yet hosts almost nobody.
To understand the magnitude of this gap, you must consider both ends of the calendar.
August is Uganda’s Gorilla tourism peak. Tour groups from Europe and North America fill the lodges around Bwindi Impenetrable National Park months in advance. The popular trekking sectors book out completely.
In 2025, August permit utilisation hit 95.8% almost every available slot filled. Lodges were turning people away. The experience, by any commercial measure, was at full capacity.
April, the same product, the same Gorillas, the same forest, runs at one-fifth of that. Not because the experience is worse, most people who go in April would argue it is better. But because the global safari industry has spent decades telling its clients that the dry season is when you go to Uganda and that message has calcified into received wisdom that is very hard to shift.
The numbers tell a stark story. Uganda has 71,522 Gorilla permits available annually. In 2025, a record 42,960 were sold, a strong result, 3.6% up on 2024 and the highest figure ever recorded. But it means roughly 28,500 permits went unsold across the year. The Statistical Abstract makes clear that the wet-season months account for the overwhelming majority of that gap. March through June and November are when Uganda’s gorilla economy bleeds.
At $800 per permit, every unsold slot is $800 permanently gone. Not deferred. Not recoverable. Gone. Across an entire April, the gap between what was sold and what could have been sold even at a fraction of peak utilisation runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Across the full annual wet season, the shortfall runs into the millions.
In February 2026, the Uganda Wildlife Authority did something it had tried before and abandoned and has now decided to try again.
UWA Executive Director Dr. James Musinguzi announced that Gorilla trekking permit prices would drop from $800 to $600 for the low-season months of April, May, and November.
Chimpanzee permits received a similar reduction, falling to $200 for foreign non-residents during the same window. The scheme has been officially branded the “Preferred Green Season” rate a name that does considerable work, reframing what the industry has long called the low season as something worth preferring rather than something to work around.
The precedent for this approach is Uganda’s own history. UWA first introduced low-season permit discounts in 2011, and the scheme drew visitors during months that had previously been nearly empty. The discounts were eventually discontinued, and by July 2025, permits had been standardised at $800 year-round. The return to seasonal pricing in February 2026 signals that UWA has looked at the utilisation data 20% in April and concluded that leaving price as the only constant in a market that changes dramatically by month makes no strategic sense.
The announcement came three months before the Pearl of Africa Tourism Expo, which opens on 21 May 2026 at Speke Resort Munyonyo. That timing is not coincidental. POATE 2026 is the first international platform on which the green season offer can be brought in front of the global buyers, operators, and distribution networks that will determine whether $600 permits translate into actual bookings or remain a policy announcement that the market never quite internalises.
There is a real difference between announcing a price reduction and selling a season. The former takes a press release. The latter takes sustained, targeted conversations with the right people and those people are at Munyonyo this month.
The case against April has always rested on a half-truth. Yes, it rains. Uganda’s southwestern highlands receive their heaviest rainfall between March and May. Roads to some of Bwindi’s more remote trekking sectors can become difficult. There are days when the sky simply opens.
But rain in a tropical highland forest is not what the word conjures for someone sitting in London or New York, imagining their holiday plans. In Bwindi, April rain typically comes in afternoon bursts, not all-day downpours. Morning trekking windows, which is when every gorilla experience begins, are usually clear. The trails are wet, yes. They are also fragrant, alive, and running with the particular energy that a forest has when it is drinking.
More importantly, the gorillas do not know it is the low season. They go on with their lives. And there is a biological reason why those lives bring them closer to the trailhead in the wet months: when vegetation growth is at its peak, food is abundant lower on the mountain.
Gorilla families that might range high and far during the dry season tend to stay lower and linger longer when the forest floor is rich. Guides who work Bwindi year-round will tell you quietly that some of their most extraordinary encounters the hour-long ones where a silverback simply sat in the open and watched you with the calm certainty of something that has nothing to fear happened in April.
For travelers who are fit and experienced, the wet season is a richer safari. For those who are older, less mobile, or trekking with teenagers, it may actually be the more realistic option: shorter distances to the gorilla families, less time on steep terrain, and a far more intimate experience at the end of it. That is a genuine and underused selling point.
And for photographers, the case is not even close. The images that define Bwindi in the global imagination mist through ancient trees, a gorilla face emerging from saturated green vegetation, light falling through a wet canopy are wet season images. The dry season is pleasant. The wet season is cinematic.
What Rwanda Got Right and What Uganda Has That Rwanda Doesn’t
The Uganda-Rwanda comparison is often framed as a pricing story. Rwanda charges $1,500 per gorilla permit. Uganda charges $800, or $600 in the green season. Rwanda is therefore more expensive and more premium. Uganda is more affordable and more adventurous.
That framing is too simple and it undersells Uganda on the one dimension that actually matters most, the gorillas themselves.
Rwanda has built something admirable. Its proximity to Kigali a two-to-three-hour drive to Volcanoes National Park, compared to Uganda’s eight-to-ten hour road journey to Bwindi, makes it the efficient, time-pressed traveler’s choice.
Its luxury lodge ecosystem is polished and world-class. It’s tourism model has fewer visitors, higher prices and maximum revenue per head is disciplined and effective. Year-round occupancy in Rwanda is strong, partly because Rwanda has done the harder work of positioning the experience as desirable regardless of season.
But Rwanda has 12 habituated gorilla families and a smaller overall Mountain Gorilla population. Uganda has 19 habituated families spread across four trekking sectors and hosts 52% of the entire global mountain gorilla population 459 individuals, according to the Statistical Abstract 2025.
The world’s largest concentration of Mountain Gorillas is in Uganda. The wildest, most challenging, most immersive gorilla forest in East Africa is in Uganda. The gorilla habituation experience four hours, four people, $1,500 and nothing like it anywhere, exists only in Uganda.
Uganda is not selling an inferior version of the Rwanda experience at a discount. It is selling a fundamentally different one. The challenge is that the marketing has never quite had the confidence to say so.
The green season is where that confidence needs to be tested. A traveler who goes to Bwindi in April on a habituation permit, spends four hours with a semi-wild Gorilla family in a misty ancient forest, and stays at a lodge that costs a third of what the same night runs in the Volcanoes region that traveler does not feel like they got a bargain. They feel like they found something the rest of the world hasn’t caught on to yet.
That feeling is Uganda’s most powerful marketing asset. It just needs to be attached to a month.
It would be easy to frame the low-season problem purely as a missed commercial opportunity. But the conservation implications of those empty April permits run deeper than any revenue chart suggests.
Uganda’s lion population has fallen to 291 individuals down from 493 in 2011, a collapse of more than 40% in fourteen years.
Anti-poaching operations across Uganda’s parks are chronically underfunded. The rangers who walk the perimeters of Murchison Falls, Queen Elizabeth, and Bwindi are paid from revenues that fluctuate wildly with the seasons. When April produces 20% of what August generates, conservation operations in the quiet months are stretched.
More critically, the communities living on the edges of Uganda’s national parks are the first line of defence against poaching and wildlife conflict. UWA channels a portion of its tourism revenues directly into community benefit programmes, school support, health facilities, and compensation payments for farmers whose livestock is killed by lions or whose crops are raided by elephants or gorillas. These payments are what make wildlife worth tolerating for a family trying to grow food beside a national park.
When permits go unsold, those transfers are smaller. When those transfers are smaller, the economic argument for coexistence weakens. The gorilla that draws nobody in April generates no revenue for the community that might otherwise have reported the poacher who set a snare on the path to the waterhole. This is the chain that runs from an empty permit in Bwindi to a wire snare in Murchison Falls, and it is more direct than it might appear.
Filling the low season is not a marketing priority. It is a conservation funding mechanism. Every $600 permit sold in April is a contribution to a system that, right now, is visibly under strain.
The Wider Low Season: Beyond Bwindi
Gorillas are the headline, but the low-season opportunity runs across Uganda’s entire park system.
Rwenzori Mountains National Park recorded a 117.7% increase in visitors in 2025, the strongest growth of any park in the country. The Rwenzoris, Africa’s third-highest mountain range, are a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose Afroalpine landscapes with giant lobelias, heather moorland and glacial valleys look like they belong on another planet. Serious trekkers have been quietly discovering them for years. The low season, when the lower slopes are green and the mountain atmosphere is at its most dramatic, is perfectly suited to the kind of traveler who seeks Rwenzori out in the first place.
Pian Upe Wildlife Reserve, Uganda’s largest protected area and home to the country’s only remaining population of ostriches, grew by 105.2% in 2025. Remote, rarely visited, and completely different in character from the gorilla parks, Pian Upe sits in Uganda’s arid northeast alongside the spectacular Kidepo Valley, a wilderness that most Uganda itineraries never reach. The wet season in this part of the country is actually when the landscape is most alive.
And within Kibale National Park, the Chimpanzee Habituation Experience four hours with research teams following chimps through the forest, similar in concept to the gorilla equivalent, is running at 28.1% utilisation. Kibale holds the highest density of chimpanzees of any forest in Africa. The experience on offer there, for a traveler willing to go in the green season and put in the hours, is as close to fieldwork as tourism gets.
Uganda is not short of things to sell in April. It is short of sellers who believe in April enough to put it in front of their clients with conviction.
POATE 2026; What Needs to Happen in the Room
The Pearl of Africa Tourism Expo, this next week, 21–23 May 2026, at Speke Resort Munyonyo, brings together Ugandan operators, lodge owners, national park authorities, and the international buyers and tour operators who send clients to East Africa. It is the most concentrated conversation Uganda’s tourism industry has with the global market in any given year.
The $600 green season permit was announced in February. Three months have passed. In that time, the industry has reported on it, debated it, and written guides explaining it. What it has not yet done, at scale, is sell it through the B2B relationships that actually move bookings.
That is what POATE is for.
A lodge manager from the Buhoma corridor of Bwindi who sits across from a buyer representing a UK specialist Africa operator has, in that meeting, an opportunity to turn a policy into a product to explain what April actually feels like in the forest, why the gorilla encounter is often more intimate than anything their clients will find in August, why the $600 permit combined with a green-season lodge rate makes a Uganda gorilla safari genuinely accessible to a traveler who has priced it at $800 and flinched. That conversation, multiplied across hundreds of POATE meetings over three days, is how market behaviour shifts.
For Uganda’s tourism authorities, POATE 2026 is the moment to make sure that every operator, every hosted buyer, and every piece of collateral in that building carries the green season story with the same confidence as the standard Uganda offer. Not as a fallback. Not as an alternative for budget travelers. As a distinct, desirable, and increasingly sought-after experience in its own right.
Because the global safari market is moving in that direction anyway. Discerning travelers, particularly photographers, conservationists, and the kind of high-spending repeat visitor who has already done the dry season and is looking for something different, are actively seeking the less-crowded version of iconic experiences. Bwindi in April, with its mist and its intimacy and its empty trails, is exactly what that traveler is looking for.
Uganda just needs to be the one telling them it exists.
The Forest Is Ready
The theme running through POATE 2026 is “Wanderlust, It’s Your Time to Thrive.” It speaks to Uganda’s remarkable tourism recovery: the record $1.62 billion in earnings, the 19.7% growth in arrivals and the Gorilla permits booked out in August.
But thriving is a year-round condition, not a seasonal one. A tourism economy that peaks brilliantly in August and nearly disappears in April is not thriving it is cycling. The lodges in Bwindi that lay off staff in April, the rangers whose operations are squeezed in the quiet months, the community programmes that receive smaller transfers when permits go unsold these are not signs of an industry at full health.
Getting April right is what turning a good tourism story into a great one actually requires. The product is there. The pricing has been adjusted. The platform POATE, this week, is exactly right. What remains is the will to sell a month that Uganda has spent too long quietly apologising for.
Somewhere in Bwindi right now, a gorilla family is doing what it does every morning. Moving through a green that has no equivalent anywhere else on earth. Unhurried. Magnificent. Largely unwatched.
Not for much longer, if this week goes well.
