🪅🦙Our Trip To Peru Through G-Adventures🦙🪅

     Hello! We are back in the U.S.A. and boy, do I have a lot to say about our amazing honeymoon!

    Before I get all the way into my rant, I just wanted to stay transparent and let you know that any links in today's post relating to G Adventures will be an affiliate link. Each time the link is used, I earn a bit for my investment account. No pressure to use these links of course, feel free to look up the site outside of my links if you prefer! Just wanted to be open and honest before we get started. 

    We decided to book through a group travel service because we didn't want to rough a new country alone, and after much research, we decided on G Adventures. We were not disappointed. This trip was everything we wanted and more!

    First off, booking through the site was a dream. We were lucky and checked out all the trips we could go on during a sale! Apparently, they have several of these per year, so if you like a specific tour, it's good to sign up for the emails and check the site regularly to see if there is a sale going on. We ended up getting an amazing deal for a week-long trip in Peru, titled Inca Adventure: Cusco, Machu Picchu & the Best Views Ever. More on this trip later, I want to talk a bit more about the site and how G Adventures operates. 

    There are several different types of tours you can do through G Adventures. Some are more "solo-ish", or private travel planning. Others are group-centric. The one we chose was a group tour and one for "18 to 30-somethings", and focused on more activities and opting to stay in hostels. These all come with different price tags, but ultimately, it's good to know there are options when traveling through this service. Most only have the group option, or they only have the private option, so it's great to be able to choose while browsing the kind of experience you are looking for. 

    With such a range as well, it makes it easier to browse for locations you normally wouldn't be able to afford, but can due to hostels, and group travel options coming with group discounts, etc.

    Another aspect of G Adventures that I loved was that in each section of the tour details, they let you know how your visit will impact the area you plan to visit. There are two ways they let you know about this. 

    First, they work with Planeterra and Reforest to do what they call Trees for Days, which aims to help reforest areas that have previously been deforested or to prevent areas from being deforested. They help by planting a number of trees per trip, and you can see how many you will contribute when booking the trip. In our case, our super cool week-long trip to Peru planted 14 total trees, 7 per person! There were almost 30 people in our group, so this trip alone planted close to 200 trees! Their page for this is super cool too, includes maps, partnerships, and even more info if you want to check it out!

    Another way they help you see how your trip impacts the place you are visiting is the Ripple Score. With the ripple score, G Adventures ensures that a majority of partners they book through (restaurants, hotels, hostels, tours, etc) are local small businesses, and are in areas surrounded by local small businesses. They also take into account how much of the money brought in through tourism would stay in those local communities and how much would ripple out through the economy in that country. For our trip, that score was 82

    Izzy and I were curious about this during our trip and asked our local guides if this was really the case, and they very enthusiastically let us know it was indeed the case. The number of guides hired by G Adventures was staggering, with immense opportunities to grow, and we were shown areas before and after in real time as guides explained how areas looked only two years ago, or five years ago. It was really great to hear how more and more travel agencies have been taking a more ethical approach to planning their tours and how it has truly positively impacted the communities they schedule their tours. G Adventures, according to our guides and a few locals we asked, has been life-changing. 

    Another really nice aspect of G Adventures was that they emailed us a day or two after booking with information on flights that they could help facilitate booking, so we would be arriving when we wanted and leaving when we wanted for a great deal through their partner. They do not have flight booking included on their website, and it was something we were worried about figuring out, but when we got the email about flight details, we were pinching ourselves. We didn't even know it was something they were going to do, but it was really helpful and streamlined the whole booking process. 

    First, they had us check out some of the flight schedules and pricing, and we ended up finding that they were the best deals out there for the times and dates we needed for our trip. Once we went ahead and picked our flights, they had us confirm our passport info and send a photocopy to ensure the booking was correct for the flights. We then called the number on the G Adventures site to pay for the flights for the third party. I really appreciated that in the email they told us to call through the site, not via any phone numbers through the email. I think this is something other travel services neglect and can result in a of scam issues. Thankfully G Adventures crosses their Ts and dots their I's. Once the flights were booked, we received a confirmation email and booking and flight details to print out and keep for our records. We got an email about three days before our trip from the individual airlines for check-in details and airport info. Then the reality of the trip hit and we were basically foaming at the mouth, ready to go!

    Another thing you will need for the trip is travel insurance. This is not included through booking, they don't have their own, nor any affiliated travel insurance brand they recommend. This portion of the "Good to Go" list they give you gave me the most grief. We shopped around and couldn't really find any definitively good or bad insurance companies for travel. We just went with Travel Guard (not an affiliate link), I think it was a good option, but I'm not totally sure as thankfully, we didn't end up having to use it. Nothing disastrous went wrong, which was ideal! On travel insurance, I would say do your research but don't get too cut up on the details. Ultimately, you are on vacation with your fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong and this is just a just-in-case precaution. Remember though, it is required to go on a G Adventures tour. 

    Ok, so how was the trip? Let me get into that now that I'm done ranting about how great I find the company. I'll be putting some pictures and letting you know how it went for us, to make it easier to follow along and paint an image of how great the tour really was. 

    We got off the plane all frazzled at 9:30am after several connections and a long haul flight (we are cheapskates cause we are not wealthy and wanted to save as much as possible on flights, lol!), and found out one of the other travellers in our group was on the same flight with us. We had signed up through G Adventures for the airport to hostel transfer and so had she and we immediately hit it off. Our first group member- yay! We headed to the hostel, a bit too early to check in, but the hostel was great and stowed our bags for until later. We went out on the town, got lunch, saw a military demonstration, and overall was just wonderstruck at the beauty of Cusco!

    The Hostel was gorgeous! It was much larger than expected with a ton of cute courtyards and fun activities to do! When we returned we started plotting all the fun we would get up to as soon as we could check in! We were at Viajero Cusco (not an affiliate link) and G Adventures or not, we highly recommend this hostel. It was amazing!

    

    Later when we were able to check in, we met the rest of our group as they were meeting up with us from the first half of their tour (they had a whole week in the western part of Peru first, and had already had some crazy adventures before this leg of the journey). Some introductions were done, and then it was totally nap time, at least for me. The altitude thankfully was not kicking my butt besides some tachycardia and shortness of breath (the theme of the week for me, lol), so I napped and awoke refreshed and ready to mingle some more. I couldn't wait for bed though because wow those beds were comfortable! Izzy and I got dinner at the bar and restaurant attached to the hostel, and hung out with some of our peers. Overall it was a relaxing evening.

    About the rest of the trip? How about I just show ya'll:

    Need I say more? For the price, this trip was epically insane and not something I'm able to put into words. Even a year later, Izzy and I still rant and rave about how amazing this adventure was. 

    Have you been on a G-Adventures trip before? Leave a comment down below! I want to hear your experience!

    All links in this blog post are affiliate links. Other links may be Acorns affiliate links. You can purchase without using the affiliate link, but using it helps me tremendously, so thank you!

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