LAST UPDATED: 6/13/25 – Part 2 – Machu Picchu and Galapagos Planning

Things are really starting to come together in terms of planning for our Machu Picchu and Galapagos Islands trip, so I thought I would post another update to share our travel planning process with you. 

If you haven’t read Part 1 of our planning process, we discussed how we picked the travel dates for our trip by answering the “what”, “where”, and “when” in our travel planning process.

In this article, I am going to discuss the logistics of our trip.  By answering the “how” and “how long” questions in our travel planning process, we will be able to start filling in our transportation and accommodation needs for the trip.  However, before we can start shopping for flights and hotels, we need to know how long we are going to be staying and what our itinerary is going to look like.

The “How” and the “How Long”

One of the most important logistical questions that we need to answer when taking any trip is how long we plan on being there.  Once you know that, you can start looking at how to get there. 

If you are taking a beach vacation and are planning on just lying by the pool or the beach and unwinding, then this might be a pretty easy question to answer.  However, if you are planning on doing some sightseeing, taking some tours, and visiting multiple locations, then the answer to this question can be a whole lot more difficult to determine.

Using a Tour Company

There are several different ways that you can handle the logistics of your trip.  The easiest way to address the logistics of your trip is to take the trip through a tour group.  When you book a trip through a tour company, they typically handle all of the logistics for your trip.  This includes, but is not limited to, such things as the following:

Things Tour Companies Typically Manage

• Airport pick-up and drop-off
• Hotel Accommodations
• Attraction Tickets
• Transportation to and from attractions
• Tour Guides
• Some meals

The “how long” question is usually straightforward because tour companies define the length of the tour. It’s the easiest way to plan a trip, but also typically the most expensive. You’re not handling the logistics yourself — you’re paying someone else to do it.

Tours also tend to be more rigid. Everyone stays at the same hotel, uses the same transportation, and gets limited free time, so your options for sightseeing and accommodations are restricted to what the company has planned.

Many travelers — especially solo travelers — choose tours for the added security. Traveling with a group is often safer than navigating everything on your own.

All of this should factor into deciding whether a tour company is the right fit for your trip. Below is a summary of the pros and cons of using one.

Planning Everything Yourself

On the other end of the spectrum, you could always handle the logistics for your trip completely on your own.  Obviously, this will provide you with a lot more flexibility.  You are going to have a lot more control over the following aspects of your trip:

• Travel Dates
• Hotel Accommodations
• Modes of Transportation
• What you see and don’t see
• Where and when you eat

Tours that you plan on your own are typically a lot cheaper than trips planned by tour agencies as well.  It makes sense because you are not paying someone else to do all the planning for you.  We have saved as much as 50% on our travel costs just by doing a majority of the planning on our own. 

Now, there will be occasions where you will find some very good deals on tours, but I would look closely at the details of these tours because typically, there is some sort of catch.

The Pros and Cons to Planning Your Own Trip

So there certainly are a lot of positives when it comes to planning your trip completely on your own.  There are also a lot of trade-offs.  For one, it is a lot more work for you.  You have to organize your airport pickup and drop-off, you have to research and book all of your hotel accommodations, you have to organize tour guides when necessary, and so forth.  It can be an awful lot of work.

You are also sacrificing some on the safety aspect because you won’t be traveling on a tour.  As I mentioned before, there is some value to traveling with a group from a safety perspective. 

More importantly, there is value to traveling with a tour guide who knows the area very well.  This is another factor that must be taken into account when planning any trip.  Below is a summary of the pros and cons of planning your trip completely on your own.

Combination Option

Before you get too worried that neither of the options I listed above sounds entirely appealing to you, there is a third option you should consider.  This is the option that we enjoy using the most because it combines many of the positive aspects of the tour group option with the positives of the self-planning option.  It is essentially the best of both worlds approach.

Instead of planning every detail of your trip, you can plan the major logistical aspects of your trip, then purchase tours at your locations to handle the smaller details.  This allows you to pick and choose with more flexibility the following aspects of your trip:

• Travel Dates
• Hotel Accommodations
• What you see and don’t see

This gives you a lot more control over when you will be able to travel and what you will get to see.  We used this option when we traveled to Tanzania, and it worked out great.  We were able to book our own flights and accommodations and then fill in with some tours. 

Instead of just visiting to go on safari, we were also able to do a tour of a coffee plantation and fly to the island of Zanzibar to explore that unique and wonderful destination.  The tour guides we used took care of all the small details on our tours.

We plan on using a similar approach with our trip to see Machu Picchu and the Galapagos Islands, so I will be able to illustrate to you much more clearly how this planning process works.  However, before I do that, let’s review the pros and cons of the combination option.

Getting Back to Our Trip

Now that we know the options that we have available for planning the logistics of our trip, we can start to put the planning together.  We should be able to start thinking about the “how long” and the “how” parts of the planning process a little closer. 

We are going to be using the combination approach, which means we aren’t going to look for an all-inclusive tour.  If you did want to look at an all-inclusive tour for your trip to see Machu Picchu and the Galapagos Islands, below are some tours that we were able to find online that visit both.

• Vaya Adventures – $9,650 per person (not including flights)
• SA Expeditions – $7,790 per person (not including flights)
• Smithsonian Journeys – $11,493 per person (not including flights)

It also means we won’t be handling every logistical detail on our own. Visiting these destinations involves too many moving parts to realistically plan everything independently. While hiring a guide at Machu Picchu is still recommended, it’s no longer universally required — some circuits can be visited on your own, and mountain hikes like Huayna Picchu and Machu Picchu Mountain don’t require a guide. The Galápagos, however, still involves extensive transportation and tightly regulated activities that are best handled through local operators.

So our plan is to book our transportation to and from South America, along with most of our hotels and in‑country flights, but rely on local tours for Machu Picchu and the Galápagos. This gives us flexibility with travel dates, saves money, and spares us from coordinating countless small details.

Galapagos Islands Tour

Before we book flights or reserve hotels, we need to look at tour availability. The first tour we focused on was the Galápagos. While Galápagos tours still fill quickly, there are now more land‑based and hybrid options than in previous years. Travelers can choose from a wider range of 3‑ to 6‑day itineraries, though boat‑based cruises still book far in advance. Availability is still a major factor, but there’s now more flexibility in choosing dates and styles of tours.

Because of that, Galápagos availability remains the key element in determining when we’ll visit.

We Chose Our Trip Dates in Part 1

In case you haven’t read Part 1 of our Machu Picchu and Galapagos Islands Planning, we checked into the available tour dates, and we decided on a visit in early September 2018.  This would give us the optimal conditions at Machu Picchu and would give us enough time to book our tour of the Galapagos Islands.  The next step is to decide which of the available Galapagos Islands tours to book.

We typically use Viator (which is owned by TripAdvisor) to book our tours because they vet the tour operators that they list, they provide a lot of reviews and traveler feedback to assist you in making your decisions, and they offer 24-hour support for the tours they sell.  We did a preliminary search for Galapagos Islands Tours and took a look at our options.

There were a number of different factors that we used to make our decision on which tour was the right one for us.  Those factors included the following:

What We Were Looking for in a Tour

• We want to see a lot of wildlife (sea lions, giant tortoise, penguins, iguanas, etc)
• We want the opportunity to do a lot of snorkeling
• We want to be able to snorkel with sea lions
• We want to sleep in hotels, not on a boat

We ended up going with the 6-Day Galapagos Land Tour: Los Tuneles Program because it met all of the requirements we were looking for, it is a very reasonably priced tour, and it has gotten a lot of great reviews on TripAdvisor. We checked into availability, and the tour is available September 8, 2018, through September 13, 2018, so we locked into those dates.

This tour still gives us the wildlife experiences we’re looking for in the Galápagos, with frequent snorkeling outings and even chances to swim with sea lions — a top priority for our group. It also uses hotel stays instead of boat accommodations, which was important for several travelers. While the tour continues to offer excellent viewing and snorkeling, Galápagos National Park regulations now enforce stricter guide‑to‑visitor ratios and limit group sizes at popular snorkeling sites. These changes help protect wildlife and ensure a more controlled experience.

With this tour locked in, the next step was finding the right option for Machu Picchu.

Machu Picchu Tour

We thought that picking a tour for Machu Picchu would be a lot easier than it was to pick a tour for the Galapagos Islands, but we were wrong.  There are so many factors that you don’t initially consider that we had to take into account.

Because of the complexities involved in reaching Machu Picchu, the logistics have become increasingly important. Most travelers still take a taxi or bus to the Ollantaytambo station and then ride the train to Aguas Calientes, followed by a short bus ride up to the site. However, PeruRail and Inca Rail now offer additional seasonal and limited‑service departures from the Poroy and San Pedro stations in Cusco, giving travelers a few more routing options. Luggage restrictions have also tightened, with only small bags allowed on the trains.

Depending on the route and timing, some tours still only allow a few hours at the site, which makes planning your transportation even more critical.

Current Machu Picchu regulations require visitors to choose one of five circuits when purchasing tickets. Each circuit follows a different route and offers different viewpoints, and some circuits no longer include access to the classic terraces. Mountain hikes such as Huayna Picchu and Machu Picchu Mountain require separate tickets. Tour companies vary in how clearly they disclose the circuit included, so it’s important to verify this before booking.

When we sat down to determine which factors were most important to us when picking a tour of Machu Picchu, we settled on the following list:

What We Wanted in a Tour

• The train ride to Machu Picchu instead of hiking the Inca Trail
• As much time as possible at the site
• Arrive at the site as early as possible to get good light for pictures
• Be able to access the high ground at Machu Picchu for picture taking
• Be able to climb Huayna Picchu (the mountain behind Machu Picchu) if possible

Inca Trail vs Train to Machu Picchu

We knew that hiking the Inca Trail would not be an option for us because some of the older people in our party would not be able to make the trip.  We are also going to be short on time because we are incorporating a trip to the Galapagos Islands into our Machu Picchu trip.

With this in mind, we took a look at Viator for tours that did not involve hiking the Inca Trail that would give us as much time at and access to Machu Picchu as possible.

When looking at the available tours, there was one tour that really had most of what we were looking for.  The Huayna Picchu and Machu Picchu from Cusco tour departs Cusco at 4am and gets you to Machu Picchu early in the morning, which will allow us to get some pictures early in the day when the light is best.

Climbing Huayna Picchu was a Bonus

This tour also includes a permit to climb Huayna Picchu.  The number of permits to climb Huayna Picchu is limited to just 400 climbers a day, so this isn’t something you can obtain when you get there.  Finally, the tour includes all transportation from Machu Picchu, which is important to some of the older members of our party.

Once we had a Machu Picchu tour picked out, the next thing we had to do was determine what date to book the tour for.  That required us to look at our schedule overall because we needed to make sure we allowed ourselves enough time to get to Machu Picchu, and then enough time to get from Machu Picchu to the Galapagos Islands (where our tour was set to start on September 8).  Here is the schedule we came up with after some deliberation:

Machu Picchu and Galapagos Trip Rough Itinerary

We want to make sure we have enough time to reach Machu Picchu and properly acclimate to the altitude, so we’re planning to arrive in Peru several days before our tour. We’ll start with a day in Lima, which sits at about 1,300 feet, giving us a gentle first step in the acclimation process before flying to Cusco.

After landing in Cusco, we won’t stay in the city right away. Instead, we’ll head straight to the Sacred Valley for the day. The Sacred Valley still provides a helpful intermediate altitude for acclimation, ranging from roughly 6,700 feet in Urubamba to about 9,750 feet in Pisac. Spending time there lets us adjust gradually before returning to Cusco, which sits at 11,154 feet and serves as our launching point for Machu Picchu.

If you’re looking for additional advice on avoiding altitude sickness, www.bestofperutravel.com has some excellent tips.

Travel to Machu Picchu

On September 6th, we will wake up early and tour Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu, and then head back to Cusco for the night.  The next day we have a full travel day to ensure that we will have enough time to get to the Galapagos Islands in time for our tour on September 8th.  This is important because we want to ensure that we make it to our Galapagos Islands tour on time.

Finally, after the six-day Galapagos tour, we will leave September 14 as a full travel day for getting back home.  We will not try to schedule a flight home to the United States on September 13, even though our Galapagos tour ends that day, because we want to make sure we leave ourselves enough time to get from the Galapagos Islands back to Quito, Ecuador for our flight home.

Up Next….

So far in our planning process, we have walked you through how we settled on the time of year we decided to travel, and how we decided to handle the logistics of seeing both Machu Picchu and the Galapagos Islands.  We now have a rough itinerary for our trip, and we have tours for the Galapagos Islands and Machu Picchu booked.  In Part 3 of our Machu Picchu and Galapagos Islands planning, we will fill in the rest of the itinerary with transportation and hotel lodging.  Things are really coming together nicely!

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