ORLANDO -- Among them, a three-hour African jungle trek in which small groups will pick their way through wooded overgrowth, peer over a cliff at a pool of hippos, cross a rickety bridge above Nile crocodiles, and dine in a safari-style camp where the gazelles are nearly close enough to touch.

But the experience won’t come cheaply. The tours, which will begin in January, will cost $189 per person on top of the basic park admission (after an introductory rate of $129 for tours booked for Jan. 16 to Feb. 26).

Disney’s “Wild Africa Trek” is among the latest projects to sprout from an industry-wide effort by theme parks to develop attractions for guests who want intimate, personalized experiences — and are willing to pay a premium for them.

Recently, SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment detailed plans to build a new tropical reef in Discovery Cove, itself a boutique experience with daily admission capped at just over 1,000 people and base ticket prices starting at $129. One of the new reef’s features: An underwater tour, limited to six people at a time, that will cost an additional $59 per person.

“There’s a certain category of guests who want more. They want to go deeper, they want to really plunge deep,” said Joe Rohde, senior vice president of creative for Walt Disney Imagineering, Disney’s attractions-design unit. “Not everyone wants this. But we want to make sure we are serving everyone.”

Theme parks have long sold exclusive activities for an extra fee. Busch Gardens Tampa Bay offers an array of tours, including a 30-minute open-truck tour of the Serengeti Plain during which guests may feed giraffes ($33.95); a walking tour of Jungala, a Congo-themed habitat for tigers and orangutans ($19.95); and a daylong experience as a keeper, assisting in the care and feeding of some of the park’s animals ($249.95). Disney offers everything from a $16 “Behind the Seeds” tour of an Epcot greenhouse to a daylong, $224 “Behind the Magic” tour of the entire resort. SeaWorld Orlando has $40 penguin encounters and $149 shark dives, among other animal-related experiences. Universal Orlando sells VIP tours of its parks that can cost $185 each.

“We listen to guest comments and develop experiences based on their interests,” said Bill Street, Busch Gardens’ director of zoo education. “After Jungala opened, we received a lot of requests to go behind the scenes with tigers and orangutans, so we created the Jungala Insider tour. There are always a lot of requests to learn what its like to be an animal expert, so we created an entire series of programs called "Keeper Experiences," where guests get first-hand experience cleaning habitats, preparing diets and interacting with a variety of animals including tigers, elephants and our animal ambassadors.”

But the parks are now devoting even more attention to such offerings as they try to mine their properties for new veins of revenue. And they are designing ever-more-elaborate experiences.

SeaWorld, for instance, has worked with a California dive-equipment company called Sub Sea Systems to develop “SeaVenture,” the dive experience it is adding at Discovery Cove.

Guests will don dive helmets attached to air hoses and descend a ladder into about 12 feet of water. Once submerged, they will follow a themed path that takes them through schools of fish and rays, and past venomous lionfish. They will be able to touch starfish and sea urchins, and watch sharks through 21-foot-long panoramic windows.