How we organize Costa Rica tours

Almost every Costa Rica tour site is a thin wrapper around a supplier feed, which means it inherits that feed’s idea of where places are. For Costa Rica, that idea is wrong in ways that actively mislead travelers.

Viator’s geography doesn’t match the country

We use Viator’s API for inventory, and we’re glad to - it’s the deepest catalog available. But its destination tree was built for global consistency, not for Costa Rica, and it shows:

• La Fortuna is filed under “Central Valley.” It isn’t. Arenal is in the Northern Plains, about a hundred kilometers and one mountain range away. Nine hundred tours are affected.
• Monteverde is filed under “Central Pacific.” It’s a cloud forest at 1,400 metres in the Tilarán range, not a beach destination.
• Manuel Antonio doesn’t exist as a destination. The country’s most-visited national park has no entry at all; its tours are filed under the neighbouring town of Quepos.
• Nosara, Uvita, Dominical, Puerto Viejo, Cahuita and Papagayo have no entries either.
• “Playa Flamingo” holds over eight hundred tours - for a village of roughly five hundred people. It functions as a bucket for the whole Guanacaste coast.

So we built our own

ToursCR uses an editorial Costa Rica geography: seven regions and the destinations people actually base themselves in, with coordinates we’ve verified ourselves. Viator’s destination IDs are kept as source references and mapped into it.

Placing a tour works in order of evidence strength. If Viator’s reference maps cleanly to one of our destinations, we use it and label it as their data. If the reference is shared or too coarse - a whole region, or the entire country - we look for the destination named in the tour’s title, then its description. Anything we can’t place with evidence is quarantined rather than dumped into a default bucket.

Every tour page shows which of those happened, under “How we placed this tour.”

Categories work the same way

Viator has over a thousand category tags, and we use them wherever they apply - they’re accurate and they come straight from the source. But Costa Rica’s actual draws aren’t in that list. There is no tag for sloths, waterfalls, volcanoes, hot springs, hanging bridges, or Río Celeste, despite thousands of tours featuring them.

For those we match evidence in the title and description, and we mark the result as our classification rather than Viator’s. Our categorization only ever adds a label; it never removes a tour from results. An earlier project of ours used aggressive exclusion rules and discarded most of a valid catalog - we don’t repeat that.

Four kinds of claim

Everything on this site is one of four things, and we try never to blur them:

1. Source facts - Viator said it. Prices, durations, images, ratings, cancellation flags.
2. Normalized values- the same fact, reshaped. A duration in minutes rendered as “6h 30m.”
3. Our classifications - placement and categories we derived from evidence. Explainable and fallible.
4. Unknowns- which stay unknown. We’d rather show a gap than invent a plausible filler.

You can see the current state of all of this, generated from the last sync rather than written by hand, on our data & coverage page.