Costa Rica honeymoon-book tour or wing it?

mustachio

Spending honeymoon in Costa Rica arriving 29th December staying for 10 days.
On a budget though at this stage booked tours for 7 days are at least £450 if not more.
Considering just "winging it" by booking a hotel and potentially day trips possibly a shorter tour on arrival. Is this a realistic plan? Will it save money? Is it fairly easy to get decent tours?

littlereddevil

Costa Rica is very spread out, so depends really what you want to do and see. The TA forum is good, full of info

DUKE

Aaaaw Costa Rica's the most beautiful country! Where are you staying? You could get a driver even for a day, we paid about £112 for 12 hours in 2014. It seemed like a lot at the time, but was well worth it. Him & his wife kept in touch by email & sent loads of different stuff for us to do, we even went to his house. Apart from that we got on a bus, took a taxi, & booked some stuff with the people in Costa Rica.

stewie_griffin

We went last April and essentially 'winged it'. We booked flights and our hotel through Expedia and then later on a hire car from Service Car rental (https://servicecarrental.com/). A hire car will be a necessity if you're going to wing it as Costa Rica is very spread out. I posted my experience of the car hire in the thread below. We had the car for 9 days and it cost just over £400 including the mandatory insurance however I sorted the CDW etc. out via a UK company.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/71390454#Comment_71390454

Make sure you check what time your flight arrives as ours got in late so we couldn't collect our hire car until the following day and had to book a hotel near the airport for one night (in hindsight we should have done this anyway otherwise it would have might driving after a long flight). Also I'd highly recommend booking transport for the airport in advance as it took us a long time to get an taxi.

There weren't any direct flights to Costa Rica when we went so we flew from Heathrow via the US (New Jersey going, Houston on the way back) but I understand there are now direct flights from Gatwick.

Make sure you plan very well in advance and try to come up with a rough day to day itinerary. Try to figure out what you want to see and do and then find a hotel that's in the best location for them. We stayed in a fairly remote hotel (deliberately), fairly close to Sarchi, and were able to go to many places but most required a 2-3 hour drive. The best place to stay will largely depend on what you want to do while you're there. We went mainly for the fantastic wildlife, hence the remote location we chose, but we were still able to get to the beach a couple of times.

The only 'tour' we went on was at Monteverde cloud forest and we booked and paid for this in advance. The rest of the days we just drove to where we wanted . The highlight of our holiday was an afternoon spent volunteering at an animal sanctuary (Proyecto Asis). If this is something you're interested in then I'd definitely recommend it.