The Galapagos Islands were not originally part of our Ecuador travel plans.
We had about ten days left at the end of our time in Ecuador and weren’t really sure where we wanted to spend them. The Galapagos had always felt like one of those incredible bucket-list destinations, but we assumed the cost of visiting the Galapagos would come with a huge price tag.
As we traveled through Ecuador, though, we started talking to locals about visiting the islands and realized there was another way to experience the Galapagos. We didn’t have to book a cruise, bounce between islands every few days, or fill our schedule with expensive day tours. We could rent an Airbnb, buy groceries, stay on one island, and experience the Galapagos much more like we had been traveling through the rest of Ecuador.
So that’s exactly what we did.
We spent nine nights in Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island with our two young daughters. We rented a two-bedroom Airbnb, cooked most of our meals, walked almost everywhere, spent our days swimming and snorkeling, and visited beaches where sea lions, marine iguanas, fish, and other wildlife were simply part of the experience.
We intentionally didn’t island hop. We didn’t take any day cruises. We didn’t scuba dive. And we never felt like we were missing out.
The Galapagos absolutely has some expensive costs that you cannot avoid. Just entering Galapagos National Park cost our family $600. But once we were there, we had much more control over how much we spent.
In total, our cost of visiting the Galapagos with kids was $1,636.73 for nine nights for our family of four, excluding flights.
Somehow, one of the destinations we expected to blow our budget ended up showing us that an expensive destination doesn’t necessarily require an expensive style of travel.
How Much Does It Cost to Visit the Galapagos With Kids?
In total, we spent $1,636.73 for nine nights in the Galapagos for our family of four, excluding flights.
That averaged about $181.86 per day for our entire family, but that number is a little misleading because $680 of our total was spent on the Galapagos National Park entrance fee and Transit Control Cards before we ever really started exploring.
Here is where our $1,636.73 went:
- Accommodation: $491.73
- Galapagos National Park entrance fee: $600
- Transit Control Cards: $80
- Groceries: $260.30
- Restaurants, coffee, and ice cream: $85.20
- Local transportation: $85.50
- Activities: $34
Once we got past those upfront costs, our actual day-to-day spending in the Galapagos was surprisingly manageable.
Our Airbnb cost us about $54.64 per night, we spent less than $30 per day on groceries, and almost everything we wanted to do on Santa Cruz was either free or very inexpensive.
We weren’t trying to make the Galapagos as cheap as humanly possible. We wanted to experience a place we weren’t even sure we’d ever visit again, while still making choices that fit the way our family likes to travel.
For us, that meant spending money where we had to, keeping everyday life simple, and not assuming we needed to buy every expensive Galapagos experience for the trip to feel worth it.
The Upfront Costs You Can’t Really Avoid
This was easily the most painful part of our Galapagos budget.
The Galapagos National Park entrance fee was $200 per adult and $100 per child, which meant our family of four paid $600 just to enter the Galapagos. We also paid $80 for our Transit Control Cards (TCT).
There really wasn’t a way around either of these costs. If we wanted to go to the Galapagos, this was part of the price.
And while $600 is a lot of money to hand over before you’ve even made it to your Airbnb, the National Park entrance fee goes toward protecting and conserving a place that is unlike anywhere else in the world. After spending nine days there, I was happy knowing that part of what we paid was helping preserve it.
This was also the part of the Galapagos that had made us hesitate in the first place. It has a reputation for being an expensive destination, and when you’re immediately looking at hundreds of dollars in fees for a family, it’s easy to assume the rest of the trip is going to be just as expensive.
But that wasn’t our experience.
Once we paid the entrance fees and got ourselves to Puerto Ayora, we had a lot more control over what we spent. We could choose where we stayed, buy groceries, walk around town, take the kids to the beach, snorkel, look for wildlife, and decide which activities were actually worth paying for.
The upfront cost was high. Being in the Galapagos didn’t have to be.
Why We Chose Santa Cruz Instead of Island Hopping
We had about nine days to spend in the Galapagos, and from the beginning, we knew we did not want to spend them constantly moving between islands.
Isabela was definitely tempting, but getting there would have meant working around limited ferry schedules, packing everything up again, moving our kids, checking into another place, and then doing the entire thing in reverse a few days later.
For us, that would have taken away from the reason we wanted to go in the first place.
We wanted to actually experience the Galapagos, not spend our limited time trying to see as much of it as possible.
So we stayed in Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island for the entire trip.
Our Airbnb had two bedrooms, a kitchen, one bathroom, and access to a shared laundry area. More importantly, it was close enough that we could walk to the main part of Puerto Ayora, the coast, the grocery store, playgrounds, and several of the places we wanted to visit.
That gave us a home base instead of an itinerary we constantly had to keep up with.
We could wake up, eat breakfast, head to the beach, swim and snorkel for a few hours, come back during the hottest part of the day, and go back out later without feeling like we were wasting precious vacation time.
And we never felt like staying on one island meant we were getting a lesser version of the Galapagos.
On Santa Cruz alone, we visited the Charles Darwin Research Center, Playa de la Estación, Playa Los Alemanes, Tortuga Bay, and Las Grietas. We saw wildlife everywhere, snorkeled with fish, spent hours in the water, and the days our kids actually enjoy.
We also skipped the expensive day cruises, island-hopping tours, and scuba diving. Steven really wanted to scuba dive, but we ultimately decided it made more sense to save that for another trip when our kids are old enough to do it too.
For our family, staying in one place did not feel like a compromise.
It meant less transportation, fewer moving days, less money spent getting from place to place, and more time actually enjoying where we were.
How We Kept Our Day-to-Day Galapagos Costs Low
Once we were in Puerto Ayora, keeping our daily costs down looked a lot like it does everywhere else we travel.
Our Airbnb was $491.73 for nine nights, or about $55 per night for our family of four. We had two bedrooms and, most importantly for our budget, a kitchen.
We spent $260.30 on groceries during our stay and cooked the majority of our meals at home. Food at restaurants in Puerto Ayora was noticeably more expensive than what we had gotten used to on mainland Ecuador, especially in the more touristy areas, so eating every meal out would have increased our costs quickly.
We still ate out when we wanted to. We spent $85.20 total on restaurants, coffee, and ice cream, including a few very important ice cream stops with the kids. We weren’t avoiding restaurants because we had to hit the absolute lowest number possible. We just didn’t see a reason to pay tourist prices three times a day when we had a kitchen and a grocery store nearby.
Transportation worked the same way.
We spent $85.50 total round trip from the airport to Puerto Ayora. When we arrived, we took the bus, ferry, and another bus into town instead of paying for a private taxi. Once we were settled, we could walk to almost everything we wanted to do. This transportation cost included a few water taxi trips to the nearby beaches.
That was probably one of the biggest advantages of choosing an Airbnb in a walkable part of Puerto Ayora. The grocery store, waterfront, beaches, playground, restaurants, and everyday things we needed were all around us.
Our goal wasn’t to do the Galapagos as cheaply as possible. It was to keep the parts of normal life inexpensive so we had room in our budget for the experience itself.
And once we had paid those big upfront fees, normal life in the Galapagos really wasn’t that different from how we were already traveling through Ecuador.
How We Had an Incredible Galapagos Experience Without Expensive Tours
This was probably the biggest reason the Galapagos ended up fitting our budget so well.
We spent just $34 on paid activities during nine days.
That doesn’t mean we sat around our Airbnb because we didn’t want to spend money. We were out exploring almost every day. The difference was that so much of what we came to the Galapagos to experience didn’t require a tour.
We visited the Charles Darwin Research Center, Playa de la Estación, Playa Los Alemanes, and Tortuga Bay for free. We paid to visit Las Grietas, but even that only cost our family $30, plus $4 to rent a life jacket for our youngest.
Our days were filled with swimming, snorkeling, walking along the beaches, and looking for wildlife. We saw animals and fish everywhere without having to get on a boat and pay hundreds of dollars for someone to take us to them.
And with two young kids, this was a much better pace for us anyway.
We would eat breakfast at our Airbnb and get to the beach early before the sun became too intense. The kids could spend hours in the water. Our oldest has always thrived in the water, and this was where our youngest really started becoming comfortable in it too. The protected bays gave her places where she could play and explore even though she wasn’t a strong swimmer yet.
We weren’t watching the clock because a tour was leaving. We weren’t trying to squeeze three attractions into a day because we’d paid for them. If the kids wanted to spend another hour snorkeling or watching an animal on the beach, we could.
There are absolutely experiences in the Galapagos that you can spend a lot of money on. You can scuba dive, take day cruises, book wildlife tours, and travel between islands. We chose not to do those things on this trip.
And we never felt like we got a watered-down version of the Galapagos because of it.
We still got the wildlife, the beaches, the water, the isolation, and that feeling of being somewhere completely unlike anywhere else we had traveled.
The Galapagos lived up to the awe we had built around it without us needing to buy every experience available once we got there.
Can You Visit the Galapagos With Kids on a Budget?
Absolutely, but I think it depends on what you consider the Galapagos experience.
If your dream is to cruise between the islands, scuba dive, take multiple boat tours, and see as much as possible in one trip, your budget is going to look very different from ours.
But those things aren’t the only way to experience the Galapagos.
We spent $1,636.73 for nine nights for our family of four, excluding flights. We paid the expensive entrance fees that we couldn’t avoid, stayed in a comfortable two-bedroom Airbnb, bought groceries, ate out occasionally, walked almost everywhere, and spent our days swimming, snorkeling, exploring beaches, and seeing wildlife.
We didn’t feel like we were constantly saying no because of our budget. We simply chose a version of the Galapagos that worked for our family.
I think that’s the biggest thing we learned from going somewhere we had originally assumed would be too expensive.
Sometimes it’s not the destination itself that blows the budget. It’s how you decide you have to experience it.
We could have added another island, booked several day tours, eaten every meal at a restaurant, and packed our nine days with activities. Instead, we stayed in one place long enough to enjoy it.
The Galapagos still felt like the Galapagos.
It was beautiful, isolated, full of wildlife, and unlike anywhere else we had been. Our kids loved it. We loved it. And slowing down didn’t make the experience smaller. If anything, it gave us more time to actually enjoy why we had come.
You don’t necessarily have to cross an expensive destination off your list because it doesn’t fit your budget. Sometimes you just have to change the way you plan to experience it.
More on the Blog:
Family Travel Costs in Cuenca, Ecuador for One Month
Family Travel Costs in Quito Ecuador: What We Spent During a Week With Kids
Family Travel Costs in Baños Ecuador: What We Spent With Kids
