In terms of the sights and the people, Patagonia was wonderful. The landscapes were larger than life, and even with photos, it was not possible to really capture the entire scope of what we saw. You just have to be there! We liked this aspect about it. We also met people on the trail who we’ve now connected with back at home. It was awesome to have made friends who have shared in such a unique and wonderful experience with us.

Patagonia was absolutely amazing!

Yes

Swoop was very helpful in helping us build out our plans and our trip, especially because we didn’t know much about the location and had never been there before. Patagonia can be a lot of information for the first-time traveler, and Swoop really helped to zone in on the specific things that we wanted to do and made it less overwhelming to figure out what we were going to do, and how.

Walk Patagonia and Chile Nativo were both great overall. I did feel that once the local partners were introduced, Swoop took more of a backseat. This is not necessarily a negative thing, but it would nice to have a consistent level of involvement from start to finish. This is because so much details are discussed with the Swoop representative in the planning of a trip, but some of those details can (and did) get lost in the transfer to the local partners.

Chalten was a wonderful city. The accomodations were great, and the hike that we went on was beautiful. Walk Patagonia was very friendly and helpful, and it was nice to be able to see them and speak to them in person in the town.

The W trek in TDP was great. The highlight of the trip was having the weather clear up for a few minutes during our hike in the French Valley! All of our reservations were ultimately handled as expected, and we appreciated both the pull from Swoop and the local partner to make that happen. We are fairly active but definitely found the full trek to be a challenge.

Yes, at least for the W portion, to consider not just the distances of the treks, but also the weight of the packs, the weather (especially wind/rain/snow), and the constant inclines/declines. We already knew about this and are physically active, but found the trek as a whole to be challenging.

Thank you to Swoop, Chile Nativo, and Walk Patagonia for an amazing trip! It would not have been possible, and each company gave us so much support both before and during our trip. Thanks to Mariana and Fernando for their suggestions and their help at their office in Chalten, and a huge shout-out to Gabriela Alvarez from Chile Nativo for being so quick to answer our questions and give us guidance (even on late nights and weekends), make last minute arrangements due to flight changes, and to have other CN guides on the same route relay important messages to us— She’s the real mvp!