Visiting the Galápagos: The Galápagos Islands, 1000km off the coast of Ecuador, have long been a source of wonder and fascination for naturalists and travellers the world over. We recently (in May 2023) spent a glorious week visiting the Galápagos islands and exploring the incredible wildlife and sights.

While we decided to visit the Galápagos quite late in our 5-month trip in South America, we did quite a bit of research prior to booking our cruise and arriving on the islands. There are plenty of different ways of experiencing the Galápagos, but for the most part it will boil down to just a couple of questions: How long do you have? and How much do you want to spend?

Here we share everything we’ve learned to help you plan your perfect trip, including how to find last minute prices on cruises. (If you’d just like to read about our awesome trip, see our other blog post about that!)

Table of Contents

• Visiting the Galápagos: An Overview of the Islands
• Planning your Visit: How Long Do You Need?
• Planning Your Visit: When To Go?
• Planning Your Visit: Getting to the Galápagos
• Cruise Ship or Island-based Day Trips?
• Island-based Travel: Hostel Accommodation on the Galápagos
• Island-based Day Trips
• How To Choose a Cruise Ship (and Where to Find Last Minute Deals)
• Side-by-side comparison: Cruises vs Day Trips
• Ready To Book? Now Read This!
• Pre-Check In and Check In: What To Do

Visiting the Galápagos: An Overview of the Islands

The Galápagos Islands are a chain of 13 major islands and a handful of minor islands, islets and rocky outcroppings. The three largest islands (Santa Cruz, San Cristóbal, and Isabela) house about 35,000 people, with the vast majority living on Santa Cruz.

Following in Darwin’s footsteps

You can’t come to the Galápagos without flying in to either Santa Cruz or San Cristóbal. All cruises start or end on one of these two islands, as do the vast majority of day trips to other islands. Isabela is the lowest-key of the three islands you can stay on, with a smaller number of hotels, a few day trips and hikes available.

For others, visiting the Galápagos is part of a longer holiday around South America, with more flexibility for how many days they have to spend on the islands and perhaps more of a focus on how to find cheaper deals while they’re there. This trip tends to be driven more by cost limitations than by time limitations.

People in the first category usually spend about a week in the Galápagos, often on one of the many cruise ships offering 4-8 day itineraries.

People in the second category will often spend 2 weeks in the islands. They base themselves on 2 or 3 of the main inhabited islands, spending 3 or 4 days in each location and doing day trips from each.

From our experience, the shortest cruise that you will want to do is 5 days. Keep in mind that the first and last day of every itinerary are ‘travel days’ – you will likely have a visit to one of the Interpretive Centres and a meal on board, but it will be a half-day at most. This means a 5-day cruise is actually only 3 days of activities. Anything shorter than 5 days wouldn’t feel long enough for us. On the other hand, an 8-day cruise might be a little exhausting – they really pack in the activities on these cruises. A 6-day itinerary might just be the Goldilocks length, but for whatever reason not many cruises offer this. Our cruise was 5 days, and it was a great length.

For an island-based visit, 2 weeks feels like the right length to us. You won’t likely want to be doing day trips every day, and there will be a couple of travel days to move between the islands as well, so 2 weeks gives you plenty of time to see ‘alot’. Anything longer than 2 weeks, you may start to suffer from island fatigue.

Visiting the Galápagos – Planning: When To Go

Of course, there are many different and wonderful things to see in the Galápagos every month of the year. There are plenty of guides out there listing a month-by-month breakdown of what’s happening with the animals and the weather, so we won’t rehash that here.

We talked to our guide, who told us the peak season is June and July – not because that’s the best time to come – but because that’s when most North Americans have their holidays. He also mentioned that in August and September the weather and water are both cold – at least by Galápagos standards. Al doesn’t like cold water, so we’d be avoiding these months.

We went in May, which is considered the shoulder season (so a good time for deals). It’s the end of the rainy season, the weather was perfect every day – no rain, warm but not hot (although the sun is intense on the water – plenty of sunscreen, hat and long sleeves are recommended…). The water was warm – mid 20’s (72+ F), which is ‘almost’ too warm (but we loved it).

Visiting the Galápagos – Planning: Getting to the Galápagos (Hint: On An Airplane)

Basically, just about every tourist arriving to the Galápagos will be flying either from Quito or Guayaquil. (And in fact, most of the flights from Quito end up going via Guayaquil). If you are spending time in other parts of Ecuador, or other South American countries (e.g. Peru), you might want to consider catching a flight from Guayaquil.

There are two airports on the islands: Baltra (GPS), at the north end of Santa Cruz Island, and San Cristóbal (SCY).

There are only two airline choices: LATAM or Avianca. 

TIP: As a foreign tourist, you MUST choose the most expensive flight option (‘L’ size for Avianca, ‘Top’ for LATAM) or you will pay a $150USD penalty on arrival in the Galápagos.

The one advantage of being forced to buy the top-tier ticket is that it is fully refundable. This can give you a lot of flexibility, especially if you are looking to do a last minute cruise and aren’t sure what day it will be leaving.

Buy your tickets at least 2-3 weeks in advance to take advantage of lower fares. It’s best to book ‘something’ a couple of weeks in advance, even if you need to change one or both of the flights later.

Shop around between LATAM and Avianca, and Baltra and San Cristóbal airports, and different days of the week. Prices can vary by hundreds of US dollars – we saw flights for as low as $150USD and as high as $1200USD.

TIP: Buy two one-way tickets instead of a return ticket. There is no difference in fare, and this gives you the most flexibility. If your dates change and want to change one leg of the journey, with a return ticket you will be forced to cancel the whole ticket – which could mean one or both of your new flights are super expensive. For this reason, it is always preferable to book two one-way tickets.

Once you’ve committed to your trip, read the Pre-Check In and Check In section below to better understand the airport experience!

Visiting The Galápagos: Cruise Ship or Island-based Day Trips?

One of the main decisions you’ll need to make is whether to take a cruise, or base yourself on land and do day-trips in small boats each day. (Or a combination of the two)

There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

You might think that taking a cruise is going to be a LOT more expensive than staying on the island. Surprisingly, while it is more expensive it’s not as much of a slam dunk as you might expect. By the time you add up all of the expenses you’ll incur staying on land, the cost is not that much cheaper than a last-minute cruise. We cover how to look for last-minute deals a little later in this post, and we’ll do a side-by-side example comparison a little later as well.

Island-based Travel: Hostel Accommodation on the Galápagos

TIP: If you are not taking a cruise, or have some time before and after your cruise where you’ll staying on the islands, you will have to prove that you have accommodation booked before you’ll be allowed to check in for your flight.

There are many very economical and pleasant hostels on all three islands. Many have very flexible cancellation policies. Booking.com lists many of them – we used this as our primary resource. 

Island-based Day Trips

TIP: DO NOT be tempted to book day trip tours online before you arrive. Some of the prices listed online are OUTRAGEOUS. Spend your first day when you arrive organizing a few trips, and go from there. Don’t worry, there is usually plenty of availability for the cruises with just a day or two of notice, especially if you have a little flexibility.

We can pretty much guarantee that if you spend a week or longer on the Galápagos and do the typical cruise or set of day trips, you’re going to see ‘most’ of the signature animals, including:

• Giant tortoises
• Sea Lions
• Blue Footed Boobies 
• Frigatebirds, Flamingoes and Pelicans
• Iguanas and lizards
• Sea Turtles
• Tropical fish

The guys that you’ll most likely need a specific tour to see are:

• Hammerhead sharks (Mostly at Kicker Rock)
• Albatrosses (Only on Española Island, only between April and December)
• Penguins (Mainly on the west coast of Isabela Island, between May and January)
• Active volcanoes (On Isabela Island)

We suggest that you do some reading before you arrive to figure out if there are any ‘must see’ types of wildlife on your list that, if you didn’t see them, your whole trip would be ruined. For us, we were just happy to be there and we figured we’d see what we see.

Day trips cost anywhere from $100 to $250 per person. It is possible to get last minute deals on some of the tours; you may see a note on the clamshell signs outside the booking offices.

Day trips will usually include a snack or lunch, a mask/snorkel, a wetsuit (maybe), and pickup/dropoff from your hotel (maybe). They often combine both snorkelling and (short) hiking activities. You’ll board the motor yacht or catamaran, cruise out to the destination, and then transport to the island in a rubber dinghy (‘panga’).

How to Choose A Cruise Ship (And Where To Find Last Minute Deals)

Most cruise ships are small, holding 16 passengers. There are a couple of large (40 or even 200 passengers), but we weren’t interested in these at all.

There are a couple of websites that list most (maybe all?) of the cruise ships, their sailing dates and itineraries, deck layouts, and last-minute prices. 

The main site that we used was: Last Minute Cruises

Just about all of the ships are listed here.

We also occasionally looked at Galapagos Cruise Links – Clearing house for last minute cruises

This seemed like it was trying to offer more of a ‘contact the ship directly’ experience, but we found that it didn’t list all of the yachts. 

Levels of Cruise Ships

There are five levels of cruise ships:

• Economic
• Tourist
• Tourist Superior
• First Class
• Luxury

We pretty much only looked at First Class ships. Why? 2 reasons:

• There seemed to be a big difference between the quality of vessel between Tourist Superior and First Class, but not that big of a difference in price.
• We couldn’t see much of a difference in quality between First Class and Luxury ships, but a big difference in price.

TIP: If you want to find out the names of all of the cruise ships currently operating on the Galápagos to do an exhaustive search of all of your options, you can find the latest list embedded within the Transit Control Card online form (See the ‘Pre-Check In section below). There is a section in the form that asks you which cruise ship you’ll be staying on, and the dropdown lists them all.

As far as Itineraries, what you’ll find is that all of the cruises rotate between 3 or 4 different itineraries. Cruise ships are only allowed to visit a particular site in the Galápagos every three weeks, so they will design a bunch of different cruises (and number of days) so that they can meet this regulation.

So by setting just a small number of criteria, very quickly you start to reduce the number of ships to a very small number that will work for you – here’s what we did (Al loves a good spreadsheet):

• Figure out what (approximate) dates we were going to be in the Galápagos and focus on those ships in those dates only
• Eliminate all but the First Class and Luxury ships
• Eliminate any that were 4 days or less or 8 days or more (i.e., only look at 5- or 6-day cruises)
• Eliminate any that were out of our desired price range (For us, we wanted to spend around $2,000USD per person)

This left us with a list of about 6 ships. From there, we drilled down on each of these and tried to imagine ‘life on board’.

• Was there enough space on the various decks to get away from the other passengers if we wanted / needed to?
• How much shade did the ship offer?
• How big were the rooms?
• Did they offer double beds, or twins only?
• Where did they depart from / arrive – Santa Cruz or San Cristóbal, and
• What did the itinerary include?

We also tried to search for each of our shortlisted ships on other websites, to see if we could find any other pictures of them, other reviews, etc. To be honest, it was difficult to find much additional information about any of the ships – the websites for all of the ships all seemed to be pretty poor, with limited numbers of pictures of the actual cabins, etc. In the end we just went on trust that it would be OK.

We ended up on the Grand Majestic Yacht, 5 day/ 4 night itinerary, which we paid $2,250USD pp for. Regular price is $4,500 pp. We were very happy with the price. (Or at least, as happy as we could be shelling out almost 5 grand!)

Side-by-side comparison: Cruise vs Day Trips

So which is better? Which is cheaper? Which would we recommend? 

Have a look at the table below. These are a couple of possible itineraries. (This isn’t what we spent – we haven’t added ours up yet and are a little afraid to LOL!)

The important thing that jumps out here is that if you can get a good deal on a cruise ship, it doesn’t have to be that much more expensive than staying on land. With the cruise ships able to travel at night from one island to the next you get to see a lot more in 5 days than on land. We estimate it would take about 12 days on land to see the same as on a 5-day cruise and a couple of days on land. On the other hand, with the island-based trip, you’ve got 12 days in heaven as opposed to only 7 days on the cruise… So many variables… take what you will from the below. 

All costs are for two people and at mid-level private room accommodation. 

Disclaimer: There are a million and one variables when you’re trying to figure out how much a trip like this will cost. Are you willing to stay in a dormitory? Are you willing to have water instead of a beer each night? Are you willing to cook your own meals in a hostel? There are plenty of ways to save money, and plenty of ways to spend money. We’ve tried to be as objective as we can with the above comparison, reflecting how we would likely travel. But take all this with a massive grain of salt. The above price may not reflect all of the costs you’ll incur on your trip…

Ready To Book? Now Read This!

Got enough info? Excited about booking your next unbelievable holiday? Here are a few hints about the process you’ll go through once you’ve picked your dates and type of trip, and booked your flights and accommodation.

Pre-Check In and Check In: What To Do

Step 1: Submit Your Transit Control Card (Pre-Check In)

Once you’ve booked your flights and your accommodation, you can fill out the mandatory online Transit Control Card. You’ll want to do this beforehand, because doing it at the airport is a laborious and oral process with the Transit Control Desk guy.

While the Authorities helpfully offer a guide to filling out the form here, they unhelpfully and somewhat ridiculously do not offer a link to the actual form…. Here is the link.

TIP: If you are travelling as a couple, choose the ‘Pre-Registro Grupal’ option on the left side rather than the ‘Pre-Registro Individual’. Later in the form it will ask you if you’re travelling as a family.

You’ll need the details of your flights and accommodation to fill in the form.

Unfortunately once you submit the form, it ‘disappears’ with no receipt of what you’ve filled out or whether it was submitted successfully. So fill it out carefully!

Step 2: Check In Processes at the Airport

While you’ll be able to check in for your flight online, there are a number of extra steps you’ll need to go through at the airport which will take extra time. Your flight will most likely be in the morning, which will mean an early-morning wakeup. There’s no avoiding this, really.

In the Guayaquil airport the quarantine and transit control are next to each other in the same area as the check in desks. I believe it’s the same in Quito.

First, go to the INGALA desk, where you’ll receive your Transit Control Card. Show your passport and they will (hopefully) find your online form. Pay the $20 USD per person fee (cash only, bills only).

TIP: The INGALA desk doesn’t open until 6:30am, so if you’ve already checked in there’s not much point in arriving much before this time.

Next, move to the SICGAL line, where they will scan your bags and seal your checked bags with a tie or tape.

TIP: You can visit these desks in either order. So choose the shorter line, and then go back to the other one.

Next, use the self serve check in machine to get your boarding pass. Don’t bother with the luggage tags, as they seem to reprint them at the check-in desk even if you’ve printed them.

Finally, go to the Check-in counter and check your main bags.

From here it’s the same process as other flights. 

Step 3: Arriving at the Galápagos Airport (either Baltra or San Cristóbal)

Upon arrival, a couple of things will happen when you get off the plane.

• First, you’ll have to pay the $100 per person entry fee (cash only) and hand over your Transit Control Card. Locals told us this is being raised to $300 per person in the coming years. When they return it, hang onto it as you do have to hand it back to them on your departure.
• Next, you’ll go to the Baggage Hall where you’ll likely need to wait while all of the luggage is inspected by sniffer dogs. Once they give you the all clear, you can grab your bags.
• If you’re heading on a cruise, you’ll easily find your cruise company at the exit area – they’ll have large signs.
• If you’re doing island-based trips and have landed at Baltra, you’ll need to take a bus ($5 per person) for about fifteen minutes to the short ferry ($1 per person) and then either a taxi (around $50) or bus ($5 per person) to Santa Cruz.
• If you’ve landed at San Cristóbal, you can take a taxi for 3 soles (about $1) into town – the airport is very close.

In A Nutshell: Visiting The Galápagos

We had an absolutely amazing time in the Galápagos, and it’s easily one of our favourite things we did in all of South America. While it was expensive, we definitely think it was worth it. Hopefully you find some value in the information we’ve provided here. Enjoy your trip!