Roaming Renshaw's

We started thinking about going to Costa Rica pretty much right after our last trip to Costa Rica 😊!  While we were in OBX during summer 2024, we pulled the trigger and reserved an Airbnb in Playa Del Coco that was ocean front and big enough for our expanded group of 12 people.  The Airbnb looked really nice but we didn’t have any experience with the area and were really basing our decision of where to stay on reviews and guidebooks.  The main goal was that we wanted to get some scuba diving in, but otherwise we had a pretty open itinerary.  We were originally looking at late June for our stay but after talking to a couple local dive shops they recommended coming in late July to try to see the whales migrating through.  Last time we went in 2023, our reservation was from Wednesday to Monday, this time we wanted to stay a whole week and landed on Saturday to Saturday.  Flying on the weekend definitely made flights more expensive and in hindsight I would probably try to book mid-week again to free up budget for other activities. 

The place, named “Al Garete”, worked out to be fairly inexpensive since we had so many adults going.  Total cost was $4650 for the week but we were splitting it between two families and three other adults, so between 7 adults it was only $1400 for each family and $700 for each of the grandmoms and Kristen’s aunt.  Once we had the place booked the next task to think about was booking flights.  We weren’t in a rush since the trip was so far away, so around January I started looking into flight options.  We thought we got a deal on flights through some Chase credit card points, but then when they sent the confirmation it said that the flight wasn’t valid because the layover was too short.  This was the first time I had an issue booking flights and it was super frustrating to think something was done only to find out it wasn’t.  Worse yet, they were saying the tickets were non-refundable even though the initial flight schedule was not available.  So they were trying to make us pay more for worse times and longer flights with more layovers.  It was ridiculous!  After arguing on the phone with several supervisors I finally got them to agree not to charge my credit card.  I felt so uncomfortable with the whole process that I actually called my bank and cancelled my existing credit card and had them put a stop on any potential new charges.  Small hassle but it gave me the peace of mind to not have to worry about some rogue charges for airline tickets that we didn’t want.  After thinking the flights were booked, now it was back to the drawing board to try to find new flights.  We finally ended up getting decent times and better layover for about $150 more per ticket than what I originally thought we were going to get.  After the flights were booked we only had the rental car to worry about which we didn’t plan on booking until much closer to the trip.  Around April I got a notice from Chase that our flight itinerary was changing!?!  Apparently the airline cancelled one of our flights and wanted to book us on an overnight layover.  That really isn’t an option when traveling with kids so I called to see what other options were available.  The Chase travel agent was helpful and was able to get us on a comparable flight to our original times.  Around June we called to see if we could switch our flight to non-stop because it looked like prices had gone down.  Chase said that we could only switch if the airline changed our itinerary again and we didn’t want to approve the change (it opened up an option to cancel or rebook if the change was initiated by the airline).  Thankfully the airline did just that a couple weeks later, unfortunately in that short time the non-stop costs went back up ☹.  We were at least able to switch our flight from PHL to BWI, PHL is only a little bit further away but it does add some travel time and since we were able to get the change to BWI at no cost….it made sense.

With about a month to go until vacation, we looked into horse back riding (we found out we could book when we got in country), scuba (we went ahead and booked ahead of time even though there seemed to be plenty of availability), and rental cars (we waited a little bit longer because we were still busy with Kristen’s recovery from the car accident).  As for scuba, the two biggest and most well-known dive shops are Rocket Frog and Rich Coast.  Both were helpful on the phone but Rich Coast seemed like they would cater to the kids a little better.  This was important to us since we had Hope and my nephew Kole that would be diving for the first time since getting certified.  The cost was about $150 per diver for a two-tank dive trip, seemed reasonable to us so we booked with them.

My sister and brother-in-law had booked their rental car already so we wanted to get that taken care of before we left.  About a week before the trip we checked out some places online and I finally called Thrifty to get more details on their insurance and the total all-in costs.  We knew from our last trip to Costa Rica that mandatory insurance can add a lot to the final bill, so we wanted to make sure we understood what “all” costs would be prior to booking.  The prices seemed to range from $400-$1200 for a full-size SUV, quite the spread!  After some more research it looked like the $400 rentals didn’t include the insurance adjustments, so these were essentially fake.  However, there were rentals including all insurance that ranged from $700-$1200, still a pretty big spread and we have no idea what the difference was?  Thrifty quoted us an all-in price of just under $800 and we saw some decent reviews for them so we went ahead an booked with them. 

Stay tuned for the next post on our trip!