Utilizing the latest Internet tools, Brook Wilkinson pits her trip-planning skills against those of a travel specialist

Choice of Destinations
In my very first conversation with Richard Edwards about Costa Rica, I defined my parameters: I could go for eight nights in March; I wanted to spend time in a cloud forest, at a volcano, and at the beach; I just had to take a zip-line canopy tour; and my budget was flexible. How he chose to fulfill these requests was his decision. To avoid being influenced by his recommendations, I sketched out my own itinerary before seeing his. Edwards sent me on a wide, clockwise circuit of the country: I would be driven from the airport to two lodges in the cloud forests northwest of San José (El Silencio Lodge & Spa and Villa Blanca); would head from there to Arenal Volcano—where I would defy gravity on a zip-line; would fly to the Osa Peninsula for two nights at the Lapa Rios ecolodge; would hop another flight to Manuel Antonio National Park's beaches and rain forest; and would be dropped off for one last night at the Finca Rosa Blanca Country Inn, outside San José, before my flight home. The itinerary I crafted myself was a smaller loop that could be done entirely by car: from San José to Arenal, then on to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve (where I'd booked a zip-line) and finally to Manuel Antonio. These are probably the three best-known destinations in the country, and while I had read in guidebooks and online about plenty of off-the-beaten-path alternatives, in the end I opted for the safe bets.

The most notable omission from Edwards's itinerary was Monteverde. As Edwards explained to me after my trip, he avoids Monteverde due to the long, bumpy approach road and the high-season crowds, instead sending clients to lodges with private cloud-forest reserves. After my own stop at Monteverde, I understood his reasoning, but found his alternatives lacking in a different way: Even though I had my own guide, the lodges required that theirs accompany me on hikes, and in one case charged quite a bit extra for this service. An obvious omission from my self-planned itinerary was a stay at Lapa Rios, the only hotel to ever appear on both Condé Nast Traveler's Green and Gold Lists (honoring its social and environmental efforts and its popularity with readers, respectively). While I had considered the hotel, the logistics of returning my rental car to San José and booking flights to Lapa Rios proved too complicated for me, but my efforts would have been worth it: The two days I spent there were the highlight of Edwards's trip.

Cost and Ease of Booking
There's no denying that using a travel specialist is going to cost more than making arrangements on your own—in my case, about thirty percent more. (My self-planned trip cost $4,500, while the one designed by Edwards was $6,250—not including international air for either.) Though most travel agents—Edwards included—won't break down each element of a trip's cost, I surmised that the extra charges for his itinerary primarily went to guides and drivers, the two internal flights, and better hotels, as well as to his planning fee. What Edwards undoubtedly did save me is time. I spent a mere 2 hours consulting with him on his proposed itinerary, and more than 23 hours planning and booking mine. What took so long? Apart from my initial research—scouring guidebooks and sites like VirtualTourist.com to decide which areas of the country to visit—the most time-consuming part of the process was booking hotels. For the small, independently owned Costa Rican properties that I chose, the process typically went like this: I'd send an e-mail inquiring about availability, wait a day or two to hear back, return the reservation form by e-mail, and request confirmation—after I'd paid a nonrefundable deposit of anywhere from 30 to 100 percent. Several of the hotels could only fax their forms, so I also had to sign up for a Web-based fax service. In one case, a property promised me a room but then forgot about my reservation and gave it to someone else.