How to get to the Galápagos Islands
The first thing you are going to have to deal with is the cost of getting to the islands in the first place. No matter how much of a budget you are trying to stick to, there’s only one way, and that’s to fly.
Flights leave from Ecuador only. You cannot fly directly from your home country so we will assume that the cost of getting to Ecuador has already been met when you set off to visit South America. The flights leave from two airports, one in the capital, Quito, and the other from Guayaquil, on the southern pacific coast. Where you enter Ecuador will have a bearing on which one to use. We were entering from Colombia so Quito was the logical choice for us.
How to buy the ticket
The first obstacle you have to overcome is buying the ticket. It’s not quite as simple as it, at first, may seem as there are different rates for Ecuadorians and non nationals. The flight cost for a native of Ecuador is subsidised by the government and so much cheaper than the price we, as non-Ecuadorians, have to pay. Getting this wrong will result in having to pay back the difference before you can board the plane.
We did a vast amount of research on ticket prices and what we should expect to pay as a non national. We first looked on websites such as Expedia and google flights and these sites seem to automatically give the non national flights. Once we had got a rough idea of what we had to pay we started looking at the local airlines such as Latam and Avianca. We found the cheapest, easiest to use and understand was Latam.
The site has options to change the language into English and the monitory units into pounds sterling or dollars. Doing this gives you a pop up with the option to go to the Latam site from your home country, in our case the UK. This will then only give you tickets at the price for non nationals. To give you an idea of the cost at the time of writing the tickets were between £400 and £600 return depending on your chosen options.
At the airport you have to buy a $20 transit card and get your bag checked and sealed against invasive species that could harm the Galápagos Islands eco systems. You need to keep the card safe as you will need it for your flight back to the mainland.