As Promised – The Galapagos; The Video!

Budget Travel, Nomadic Lifestyle, Travel

Well, here it is, finally! I’m fairly pleased with the final result. If you have the bandwidth available watch it in HD in fullscreen mode…get my money’s worth!

The video is basically a summary of my 10 days of travel in The Galapagos Islands. The cruise that I went on was rather nice. The yacht was exceptionally spacious and our itinerary wasn’t too bad. Without further adieu….the video:

So, for anyone planning on traveling to The Galapagos on a budget, this has to be one of the hardest trips to plan for. There is an over-abundance of information out there with many agents making bookings for tours. I’m not sure if the way I did it was the best way, but I do know that I paid significantly less than some of the people on my tour.

Here’s my experience with budgeting for and booking travel in The Galapagos:

Fortunately, I have a friend who was there about a year before I was, and he was happy to provide me with some great information. The bottom line is, if you’re going to The Galapagos, budget at least $2000 per person. To set foot on the islands is going to cost a minimum of $500…considering the price of the various cruises, that doesn’t leave much left-over from your original 2K.

There are two airlines that serve The Galapagos and the prices are fixed and vary only due to high season vs. low season and whether one flies from Quito or Guayaquil. The national park entrance fee is $100 (though the government of Ecuador may be doubling that soon) and there is a $10 fee for a Galapagos transit card.

Quick tips: Galapagos flights
The cruise operators reserve blocks of seats to accommodate their clients. If their respective cruise doesn’t fill up, there will be empty seats on the plane….so, in my case, there were no flights available for me until Tuesday (which I went ahead and purchased) but if I would have showed up at the airport earlier than Tuesday, there’s a very good chance that I would have been able to get a seat….hindsight 20/20 and all that.

Another good pointer is that it is possible to fly to either Baltra or San Cristobal Island and then fly out from the other one. If you’re thinking about a 4 day cruise this is handy because you can save yourself a water-taxi ride between the two islands when your cruise is over.

Tickets to/from The Galapagos are very flexible and the airlines are happy to change your dates or even change your departure island and not charge any fees for it.

O.K….so with the flight sorted I arrived on Baltra Island and had to take a water taxi to Santa Cruz Island and then a bus to the town of Puerto Ayora. This is the largest settlement on The Galapagos and is full of tour agents, hotels, restaurants and pharmacies…yes pharmacies WTF? Not knowing when I would be starting a cruise I only booked my hotel for the first night. I then set out to find a cruise. I had an itinerary in mind and I knew it would be expensive. I wanted to go to Isla Fernandina and the west side of Isabella. The transit times to these islands are quite great so there aren’t many tours that go to them and the ones that do are expensive. Every agent I spoke to tried to talk me out of going….but still tried to find space for me when I insisted. It soon became apparent that my desired itinerary simply wouldn’t be available to me unless I was willing to spend a week in Puerto Ayora waiting around (and no, I wasn’t willing) so…it then came down to price and class of service. When shopping on the Internet for a cruise, there was a large separation in price between the “economy” class and “luxury” class of service. That gap seemed to narrow a bit at the agents in Guayaquil and it was very narrow at the agents in Puerto Ayora. In the end I found a ship that had a fairly good itinerary in the luxury class for a bargain. Internet price for an 8-day cruise on “The Millennium”: $3200….price in Puerto Ayora after hard bargaining: $1100 (as an aside, “tourist” class cruises were being sold in Guayaquil for $1200 and “tourist-superior” class cruises could be had for $930 in Puerto Ayora).

Lessons Learned

I was there in the “off” season. That would lead one to believe that prices should be lower and availability greater. Not so! During this time, many boats are moored and there simply aren’t spaces. I was told by many an agent that the space he was trying to sell me was the last space for that particular cruise…of course I figured it was a line, but later, when inquiring about the same cruise from a different agent I would find it to be sold out. Any reduction in prices is simply an indication that the worldwide economy sucks and has nothing to do with what time of year it happens to be. The tour operators and agents know how much you spent to get to The Galapagos and seem reluctant to budge much at all on price.

When you have negotiated the lowest possible fare on a cruise, there’s no room for the operator or the agent to pay any credit card processing fees – and I’m not sure that’s even possible on The Islands. I was able to go to the bank and get a cash advance for a sufficient amount to pay for my cruise in cash. There was no fee for doing this, not even from the thieving assholes at Wells Fargo bank.

There you have it, that might not be the way it’s supposed to be done, but that’s the way I did it. If this helps even one person plan for The Galapagos then I’m happy to have taken the time to write it up.

Will @ December 2, 2009