Costa Rica trip was awesome! Just a couple suggested improvements
Overall our Costa Rica trip was amazing! We saw a variety of regions in the country-from lush, green rainforests to coffee & pineapple plantations to beaches on both Caribbean & Pacific coasts! All beautiful and interesting. We experienced a variety of cultural activities - Caribbean dancing & cooking, chocolate making, and wildlife presentations and excursions in nature. Our local guide provided valuable information about history, culture and biology! She also chose wonderful restaurants with a variety of local foods. Wonderful experiences!
Areas for possible improvement:
-Some educational tours may have been more interesting to adults than teens. Hopefully some of the information will stick with them! The more interactive that the tours were, the better. I found it all interesting though.
-A couple of the days had 4 or more hours of freetime which can be great except when there aren't options for things to do. Both times we were in locations where we couldn't walk anywhere or weren't close to a town. Day 1 we had a full day of freetime and we were really quite restricted to the hotel for entire day with no areas for walking anywhere. No wonder some of our teens went stir-crazy! Another day we had 5 hours of freetime and weren't near a town and only had a short nature walking path that took less than 10 minutes to walk. We had nothing to do but sleep or sit around so it felt like a bit of a wasted afternoon even though it was in a beautiful location. It might have been nice to have some optional activities that afternoon.
-One negative experience was that people in our group were charged extra in 3 of the 4 hotels we stayed in for repairs, most of which we felt we weren't responsible for! The 1st place was understandable. The boys admitted they were playing/chasing around. (It's absolutely no excuse, but that was the day when they had no place to go but the hotel! So it might have been helpful to have an optional activity for them to spend their energy in a positive way). Nevertheless, responsibility was taken and that bill was willingly paid, although the cost was very inflated from what the replacement cost would have been ($80 to replace a cheap ironing board?). Then when the group got charged 2 more times in different places for things that nobody even touched we became suspicious. It made us feel like we were being taken advantage of, as if they wanted the U.S. dollar for making their own hotel repairs! We really love to support local businesses and want to be respectful guests and I felt like we were. Our local guide also did nothing to help us with communication or to advocate on our behalf which was disappointing. It was really too bad because the rest of our trip was so wonderful and the places we stayed were a special part of the cultural experience. After those experiences we started taking photos of every room we stayed in so we wouldn't be charged for something that may have already been damaged or in poor condition before we arrived! It really isn't the best customer service and it doesn't leave visitors with the most positive feeling. We really don't want that to affect other people's impression of what is a beautiful country and people! Again, it was sad and disappointing and unfortunate because most of our experience was wonderful!
