A hot air balloon safari asks a lot upfront: a pre-dawn wake-up, a genuinely significant cost on top of the day's game drive, and complete dependence on weather that can cancel a flight with little notice. It's fair to ask whether it's worth building into an itinerary at all.
For most travelers who do it, the answer is yes, and not just for the photographs. Watching the plains wake up in silence from a few hundred feet up, animal trails visible as pale lines through the grass, gives you a sense of the ecosystem's scale that no ground-level game drive can. The traditional champagne breakfast set up in the bush afterward is a nice bonus, not the main event.
We treat it as an optional add-on rather than a default, since it genuinely doesn't suit everyone's budget or morning tolerance, and we're upfront that weather can cancel it on short notice. When it does fly, though, it tends to be the single moment travelers mention first when they talk about the trip afterward.