Cost breakdowns

This page explains our position regarding how we present price information

Our business model

The Colombian Way is a tour operator. We design and sell tours, our tours have a cost. In most circumstances our clients will be issued with a tour plan with a cost associated. This shows clients what they are being sold and how much that package costs.

We have preferential commercial rates with hotel and airline partners and extensive infrastructure on the ground in Colombia. Our aim is to charge the same as it would cost to put together an identical package yourself. The effort to provision a tour is considerable, the difference between our wholesale rates and our retail rates is how we make our money. We are not a concierge service, we do not charge booking fees or planning fees.

We only sell B2C. If your tour does not say The Colombian Way on the top then it is not one of our tours. We do not resell tours of other companies and we do not allow third parties to sell our tours.

In addition to aiming to charge the same as it would cost to build the same tour yourself and undertaking the provisioning work. The Colombian Way also assumes ownership of your tour, monitors flights for changes, resolves any issues you may have during your trip, provides unlimited advice about Colombia and seeks to give you a happy and fulfilling relationship with us during the planning of your trip.

It is not uncommon for us to resolve any operational issues by upscaling hotel options or occasionally booking your party into a higher class of travel. Of course at no additional cost to you.

Tour plan vs. schedule of costs

• If your services are geographically and chronologically contiguous and resemble an end-to-end tour with few or no gaps then this is a tour and you will be issued with a tour plan. A tour plan will have a cost that is almost always a cost per person based on the number of people travelling.
• If you are booking discrete services with gaps, free days with no services and in disparate parts of the country, if you are travelling semi independently, then you will more likely be offered a schedule of costs.

The reality can be a little more nuanced. During your dialogue with us you may have been sent various iterations of outline tour plans, you might have asked roughly how much it would cost to add or swap something. You might have asked us to reduce costs and discussed this with us already.

Why don’t we want to give you a breakdown?

We have no problem with transparency and offering pricing as soon as we have identified your travel plans. However if we have sent you a tour plan and you have requested a breakdown then you have requested something that does not fit well with our business processes, something that causes substantially more work and something that we never offered to clients in the first instance. Our company has always deigned to offer tour plans with costs for the entire tour.

Why is it so complicated?

• You have most probably allowed us to suggest hotels and add those into your plan. That’s great because directing all of our clients to a handful of carefully curated hotels means that we are not only offering you hotels that we know will make you happy but we are getting better commercial rates. Our commercial agreements with hotels prohibit us from telling anyone what we pay for your hotel rooms. We can search online for the same hotel rooms and tell you that price but you can do that yourself.
• In the context of a tour plan we may choose to lose money on something, a discrete element of your tour, we do this to facilitate a larger more profitable part of your tour. That is our right and we will lose money strategically to ensure good value tour plans. Providing you with a cost breakdown supposes that we are happy for you to remove all the elements that are commissionable or discounted but leave in all the elements that are loss making. That is not the case.
• Sometimes we estimate prices, you might have asked for something a little different and we might have priced it based on how much something similar costs. Sometimes we use benchmarks for unpublished flights. Within the context of an extended tour plan it doesn’t matter so much if our estimates are a few percentage points up and down each way. This evens out. In the context of a schedule of costs though each and every price has to be correct. This increases our administrative workload and ultimately would increase the cost of your tour.
• Some elements are considerably more difficult and time consuming to organise than others despite their potentially being economical. Our website states that various destinations are only available within the context of extended tours. Yes they are economical but we do not deign to sell them unless you are booking a lengthier tour.
• Providing a cost breakdown for a tour plan infers that we are happy to sell each element at the cost listed in the breakdown. This is not necessarily the case, as such, having spent time generating a cost breakdown, it is potentially meaningless.

Given the above factors. When generating a cost breakdown for a tour plan, the costs are frequently not real. Hotel prices may be increased to match online prices. The losses of loss making elements will be removed where possible making them appear undesirable. The final price might not add up so whereas generating a tour plan with a final cost is tangible and based on actual costs. Providing a cost breakdown for that tour requires far more effort as the numbers are frequently fabricated.

Here is what we can tell you.

• Hotels will be at market rates regardless of what we pay for them
• National airline flights will always be cheaper when built into your tour plan
• We will charge more for flights on regional airlines as they do not offer commercial agreements. It is entirely possible that you cannot book these flights yourself
• Overland transfers in Colombia are expensive. Flying is almost always faster and cheaper.