Questions about this site

An independent research desk with no stake in any tour on it. Nobody here drives, guides, operates or resells a single departure on Rapa Nui, and no page pretends otherwise. The work is reading every live booking page for the island one at a time, comparing what each tour actually contains, and writing the differences down. Durations, stop lists, pickup arrangements and cancellation terms belong to the operator's own listing and are attributed there. Park rules, ticket prices and entry requirements come from the official Chilean and Ma'u Henua sources rather than from another travel page. There is no named byline on this site yet, and until there is, nothing here is written in the first person or claims a visit that nobody at this desk has made.

Real, and each one was opened individually. Seventeen live product pages for the island were read across the two booking platforms this site links, and the 8 shown are the ones whose figures survived being checked. Every card names its operator, its duration, its stop list and its own rating and review count, all copied from the listing itself. The reviews quoted on the homepage are word for word from those listings, including the typos. If a tour on this site ever stops being bookable, its card comes off rather than sitting there as a dead link.

Through affiliate commission. The links to tours carry a partner tag, and if you book after clicking one, the booking platform pays us a share of the commission it already earns from the operator. You pay exactly what you would pay arriving at that listing directly, because our cut comes out of the platform's margin rather than being added to your price. The affiliate disclosure names the platforms involved and sets out the full arrangement.

No, and none has been offered the chance. Nothing here is sponsored, there is no advertising, and no placement is for sale. Where a category leads with one tour, it leads on the size of its own review record: the flagship full day at 4.8 across 103 reviews, the two-day package that is the most-reviewed listing on the island at 259, and the 4.9-rated private moai monuments day at 28. The lineup would look identical if the money stopped tomorrow. No page here was written from a complimentary seat or an operator's hospitality, and no operator has been given sight of a page before it went live.

Every rating and review count was read on two independent passes rather than taken from one screen, then cross-checked a third time against structured search snippets. Two reads agreeing is the bar for printing a figure, which sounds fussy until you watch a price drift between a cached result and the page it points at. When the reads do not agree, the figure simply does not get printed. It is not averaged, not split down the middle and not quietly taken from whichever source looked better. That rule has already cost this site numbers: one price that came back attached to the stargazing session belonged, on the second read, to a different product entirely, so it was discarded rather than published.

The 8 tours here carry 683 traveller reviews between them, and that total is the sum of the real per-listing counts rather than an estimate. The spread inside it is shown rather than smoothed, because scale and intimacy are opposite businesses. The two-day highlights package holds 4.4 across 259 reviews, the most-reviewed listing on the island, and a 4.4 on that base is a tested product rather than a weak one. The private archaeology day holds 5.0 across 20, which is a perfect record on a base small enough to say so out loud. Both numbers are printed exactly as they stand.

It is the floor, not a quote: the cheapest option on that tour, per person, in USD, at the moment the listing was read. Your real number depends on the date, the group size, the option you choose and the country you are booking from, which is also why the same tour can display a different figure in a different currency. Across the 8 tours the from-prices run $100 to $294, with the night-sky session at $140 and the packages between $170 and $250. Every card opens the listing, and the listing is always the authority on what you will be charged.

Refreshes are done by re-reading the live listings rather than on a schedule this site would rather promise than keep, and the whole set is re-run when the season or the market moves. There is no "last updated" stamp on any page here, because a stamp is a claim about freshness that a page cannot keep on its own. What is on file instead is the verification date behind every figure, which is what a correction gets checked against when you send one.

Three tests, all of which a tour has to pass. It has to be a real guided experience on Rapa Nui with an operator, a published itinerary and a certified guide. It has to be genuinely bookable right now by an individual, on a live product page. And its figures have to survive being read twice. Seventeen listings were read and 8 are shown. Two of the nine held back carry strong review records but return no readable price on any channel we can check, so they are named in articles rather than carded. Two more priced on one read and refused to confirm it on the second. Five rest on review bases under fifteen, one of them a $1,043 four-day package with three reviews and no free cancellation, which is not a base to hang that decision on. None of the nine is excluded for being bad; they are excluded for being unverifiable at the level this site prints.

Yes, on the same terms as everyone else, and not by paying. A tour appears when it has a live, bookable product page an individual can reserve, a published price that reads the same twice, and a review base solid enough to compare against the rest of the lineup. Operators are welcome to write in with a listing link, and several of the nine currently held back would move onto the site tomorrow if a stable price appeared on their pages. What no operator can buy is a card, a position or a kinder description than the numbers support.

No. This is an independent comparison site with no connection to the park authority, to the Ma'u Henua community that administers the park, or to any Chilean government body. Park tickets are sold by the park itself at rapanuinationalpark.com, currently $100 for a foreign adult and $40 for a child, valid ten consecutive days, with single entry each at Rano Raraku and Orongo. The entry form every visitor files before boarding is the FUI, at the Chilean interior ministry's portal. We sell neither, we take no cut of either, and no tour on this site includes the park ticket in its price.

No, and it is worth being blunt about it: we hold nothing and can move nothing. Your reservation sits with the operator and the booking platform you paid through from the moment you paid. Amendments, cancellations, refunds, accessibility questions, dietary notes and a running-late message all go through the confirmation email you were sent, which carries your reference and a message button that reaches the people actually holding your seat. Writing to us first only costs you time. A weather call on the stargazing session or a schedule change on a sunrise departure belongs to the operator as well, and its listing is the only place that will know.

On the terms themselves: six of the eight tours on this site cancel free up to 24 hours before departure, which matters more here than in most places, because departures on an island of one town are genuinely finite, December through March fills them weeks out, and Tapati in late January squeezes everything at once. Holding a seat on a free-cancellation tour costs nothing but the click. Two of the eight do not offer it, and their cards say so plainly rather than borrowing the terms of the others. The policy on the listing you book is the one that binds, and it is the version to read before you pay.