I’m working on a small project involving birding tours but find myself betrayed by my lack of experience booking birding tours. For one thing, I’ve been extremely fortunate to know local birders during many of my travels. In other instances, I haven’t exactly been in a position to choose between multiple operators. In the Bahamas, I had only one choice, albeit an excellent one, while poor Puerto Rico didn’t even offer that many.
What I’m wondering is what factors one weighs when confronted with multiple operator options. Do you go with the biggest shop? The smallest? The one with the best photos on its website?
Another question is whether there exists some useful resource for reading reviews of different birding tour operators. As far as I can tell, such information is scattered across the web when it exists at all.
I’d love to hear your experiences in researching, hiring, and using the services of birding tours. If you’re a tour operator, I’m very interested to know what criteria you feel potential clients should consider when making their choice. Let’s pool our vast collective knowledge and experience! Please leave your comments below or contact me directly if you’d prefer.
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Mike–
Good topic. There’s a new Yahoo! group, BirdingGuideReviews, that tries to collect reviews of specific guides and itineraries. So far, traffic is light, but it could end up being a valuable resource.
I wrote an article in WildBird a couple months ago that covered a few thoughts about choosing a tour. In essence, I suggested that tour companies are like colleges–there are some with great reputations, a few with bad, and that it makes sense to choose the former, if you can. But in the end, it’s really the course and the professor that make or break it.
You may take a class you’ll love at Podunk State, or get a real bummer at Harvard, depending on which course it is and who’s teaching it. The bird tour analogs are itinerary and leader, and it’s best to get a handle on both, if you can.
Talking to friends, reading detailed itineraries and trip reports, and asking for references from the companies are all helpful, but as you suggest, a bit scattered and labor intensive.
Over time, I hope that a useful web source for all this sort of information will emerge–and when it does, I hope it’s long on useful detail and short on personal attacks.
Good birding,
Jeff
PS: My comments come primarily from two decades of experience as a professional bird tour leader, though I’ve certainly been in the position of tour participant plenty, too. I’m always interested to hear what non-leaders have to say on the subject; after all, they’re the ones parting with the cash.
A few somewhat random thoughts…
On a recent trip to Costa Rica, my little group (3 of is) hired guides for two days. One from La Selva OTS, Rudolfo, was phenomenal. He made us feel like he was just another friend going birding, only he took us to all the great spots. He was with us sun up to sundown, a little expensive but he was really dedicated and really enjoyed being out, so he made sure he was worth it.
Our second was at Monteverde who was good, but treated it more like a safari. He would quickly put birds in the scope without telling us first where they were, so it felt like we weren’t birding, but just passively looking. I don’t know about other people, this is just me, but I prefer to find the bird myself and then I’ll look at it in the scope. I like to feel as though we’re birding together and not just being led along, even if we’re really being led along. We still saw lots of good birds but it felt different. And to be honest, we tipped accordingly.
Both of them were booked through the place we were staying so it was kind of a crap shoot. My friend did tell the booking agent that we were looking for specific birds, so they probably realized we were pretty serious and put us with people (especially the first one) who would be able to find them.
We read some reviews after the fact and some people really liked the second guy we were with, but they didn’t sound like hard-core birders (misspelled a few bird names) so maybe they preferred the safari style. I don’t know.
Those have been my only guide experiences.