An African safari on a Web travel deals whim: Smart buy or into the lion’s den?

It was a few minutes before midnight, and we’d just ordered a fresh round of drinks at a neighborhood bar. It was nearing the hour when bad decisions are usually made, and this one could be our costliest.

“Well, what do you want to do?”

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A sip. A pause. A decision.

“Let’s do it,” my wife said.

The seconds were ticking toward the midnight deadline as I whipped out my iPhone, opened the app and ended a week of stomach-churning indecision. With less than a minute to spare, we’d bought a safari trip for two to Kenya from LivingSocial.

Now, we’d previously purchased pizza and wine and picture frames from LivingSocial, the Washington-based company that offers online discounts for a variety of goods and services. But we’d never dug this deep into our pockets. We’d read Hemingway and idly chatted about visiting Africa someday. But for the most part, the LivingSocial offer simply popped up at the right time: We wanted a vacation; the Internet offered what seemed like a good deal. The price tag was $2,697 per person — discounted $1,800 each — and included airfare, a week of lodging, meals and tours across three Kenyan wildlife reserves. We bit.

“I think we’re seeing a shift in the way people purchase travel,” says Dave Madden, the North American general manager of LivingSocial Escapes, which launched in November 2010. Just last month, the site sold its 1 millionth room-night. Madden said it took 11 months to sell the first 500,000 and only five months to sell the next half-million. A variety of other online outfits — Travelzoo, Yuupon and Groupon Getaways among them — offer similarly discounted trips. They’re all taking advantage of this travel shift, in which impulse has replaced deliberation.

Several weeks and 19 hours of flight time later, our green van pulled out of a resort in Nairobi and headed west. The Internet offer had attracted all sorts — nearly 275 people bought the deal — and our group of 22 was a mix of families, young couples, mothers and daughters and even an 83-year-old widow.

The pavement disappeared as we bounced toward the Maasai Mara National Reserve, and our van wove around canyons disguised as potholes. “African massage,” our driver told us.

We’d been sold on the trip by a few paragraphs of Disney-style advertising type, and even though a more detailed itinerary followed, we still didn’t know what to expect. Most of the people on our safari had similarly splurged on a sense of adventure and uncertainty.

“We weren’t planning it at all,” said Kristie Primmer, a 32-year-old executive assistant in Arlington. “And then it popped up.” She sent it to her husband, saying, “ ‘Hey, what do you think? Wanna go to Africa?’ It was a big purchase, and it felt like a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants kind of thing.”

LivingSocial sells spontaneity. The company rolls out at least 40 new deals every Monday — nearby bed-and-breakfast inns, a weekend trip to the Caribbean or a faraway adventure like ours. According to the company’s own research, 70 percent of Escapes customers have no plans to purchase a trip before stumbling across the discounted offer.