Wakoo Tours publishes one price per tour and does not run seasonal discounts, flash sales or “promotion” pages. This page is the whole price list for a Manuel Antonio National Park guided tour in December 2026 and January 2027, what each price actually buys, the separate government ticket you also have to pay, and the dates the park is closed. Read it before you compare quotes anywhere else, because most of the price differences you will find online are not discounts at all: they are different things being sold under the same words.
Ready to book? Message us on WhatsApp at +506 8514 1361 or go straight to the December and January booking page.
The cheapest guided option is the Classic Group tour at $30 per person. That is a shared walk through Manuel Antonio National Park with a certified naturalist guide who carries a spotting scope, in a group that walks the main trail system at a pace slow enough to actually stop when something is spotted. The $30 covers the guide and the scope. It does not cover the SINAC park entrance ticket, which every visitor buys separately and which costs $18.08 for a non-resident adult and $5.65 for a child aged 2 to 12, as published by SINAC on 25 September 2026. So the honest all-in number for one adult on the cheapest guided option is $48.08, not $30, and any operator quoting you a single low number without naming the entrance ticket is quoting you half the price.
There are four prices, and they are the same in December 2026 and January 2027 as they are the rest of the year.
The single most misread line on that list is Premium. At $65 it sits between the group tour and the private tours, and a lot of people assume the jump from $30 to $65 buys privacy. It does not. Premium is a shared tour with a smaller group. If what you want is a guide who belongs to your family alone, the first price that buys that is Classic Private at $69 — four dollars more than Premium, and a completely different product.
For most first-time visitors the $30 Classic Group tour is the right choice, and we will say so even though it is the cheapest thing we sell. The wildlife you see in Manuel Antonio depends far more on having a trained eye and a scope than on how many people are standing behind that scope. A sloth thirty metres up a cecropia looks like a lump of moss to everyone in the group until the guide puts it in the scope, and then it looks like a sloth to everyone in the group.
Pay more when one of these is true. You are travelling with small children who will not hold a group’s pace. You have mobility limits and need to stop or turn back on your own schedule. You are a photographer or a serious birder and you need to stand still for ten minutes at one tree while a group of sixteen wants to move on. Somebody in your party does not speak English or Spanish comfortably and needs the guide’s full attention. If none of those describe you, the extra money buys comfort, not sightings.
Included in every price on this page: a certified naturalist guide licensed to work inside Manuel Antonio National Park, a professional spotting scope, and photos taken through that scope of what your group finds. Not included, in any of the four prices: the SINAC park entrance ticket, transport to the park gate, food, and drinks beyond your own water.
We list the exclusions because the exclusions are where price comparisons go wrong. A tour advertised at $55 “all inclusive” and our $30 plus an $18.08 ticket are within seven dollars of each other, and the difference is usually a bottle of water and a ride. Ask any operator you compare us against for the same two lists.
Yes. Manuel Antonio National Park tickets are sold only online through SINAC, Costa Rica’s national park service, and they are never sold at the gate. The price is $18.08 for a non-resident adult and $5.65 for a child aged 2 to 12, checked against SINAC’s official park page on 25 September 2026. Every guest needs a passport number to complete the purchase, and the park caps entry at 2,500 visitors per day, which is why the ticket is the part of your day that can actually sell out.
No guide, ours or anyone else’s, can get you in without that ticket. If an operator tells you the entrance is “handled” without naming a price or asking for passport numbers, ask again.
SINAC opens each day’s tickets exactly two months before that day, and not one day earlier. That two-month window is the single most expensive thing to get wrong about a Manuel Antonio trip, because it is not a booking policy you can negotiate around — it is a government system with a hard date.
In practice: tickets for a visit on December 20, 2026 open around October 20, 2026. Tickets for a visit on January 10, 2027 open around November 10, 2026. If you are reading this and your travel date is less than two months away, the window is already open and the 7:00 a.m. slots are the ones that go first. If your date is more than two months away, put a reminder in your phone for the day the window opens.
The park is closed every Tuesday. Entry runs 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., Wednesday through Monday. For the December 2026 and January 2027 season that means nine closed dates, and no price on this page can buy you a tour on any of them:
If your only free day in Manuel Antonio falls on one of those nine dates, message us before you book anything. There are guided options outside the park boundary on Tuesdays, and it is a better conversation to have in advance than at 6:30 a.m. at a closed gate.
There is no percentage discount, and we would rather tell you that plainly than invent one. What changes with group size is which option is the best value, not the price per person.
A family of four on the Classic Group tour pays $120 plus tickets. The same family on Classic Private pays $276 plus tickets. For a family with children under eight, that $156 difference frequently pays for itself, because a private guide can turn around when a four-year-old is finished and a group guide cannot. For a family with teenagers, it usually does not. For a party of eight or more travelling together, the group tour is effectively already private, because your party fills the group — that is the closest thing to a volume deal that exists here, and it costs nothing extra.
Because a discounted tour price in Manuel Antonio almost always comes out of the guide. The guide is the entire product — the scope, the eyes, the eight years of knowing which tree that particular sloth sleeps in. An operator who cuts the tour price twenty percent in low season is either paying the guide twenty percent less, putting twenty percent more people behind the same scope, or was overcharging in high season.
The $30 group price has not moved and is not going to. It is a decision, not an opening offer. What that buys you as a traveller is that the number you see in October is the number you pay in December, and you do not have to time your booking around a sale that is not coming.
Book the tour as soon as your travel dates are fixed, and buy the SINAC ticket the day its two-month window opens. Those are two different clocks and people miss the second one constantly.
The tour itself we can usually accommodate at shorter notice, because we control our own guide schedule. The park ticket we cannot, because nobody controls SINAC’s 2,500-per-day cap. For December 2026 and January 2027 — the highest-demand weeks of the Costa Rican dry season, including Christmas and New Year — the 7:00 a.m. entry slots are the first to disappear, and the 7:00 a.m. entry is also when the wildlife is most active. Late entry on a busy December day is the worst version of this trip at any price.
Tell us your dates on WhatsApp and we will confirm the guide and the payment terms for your specific date before you send anything. We do not publish a blanket deposit rule on this page, because the answer depends on the date, the option and how many guests you are, and a made-up number here would be worse than no number.
What we can say without qualification is that the SINAC ticket is paid in full to SINAC at the moment you buy it, by you, in your own name with your own passport number. That part is never a deposit and never refundable through us.
Rain does not cancel a Manuel Antonio tour and does not change the price. The park stays open in rain, and wildlife activity often goes up right after a shower — the halloween crabs come out on the forest floor in numbers you will not see on a dry morning. Bring a light rain layer and expect to use it any month of the year.
For cancellations, message us as early as you can on WhatsApp. The tour and the park ticket are two separate purchases with two separate policies: we handle the tour, and SINAC’s refund rules govern the ticket regardless of what we do.
All four options start at the Manuel Antonio National Park main entrance, and transport to that entrance is not included in any price on this page. Most guests are staying along the Quepos–Manuel Antonio road and either walk, take the public bus, or take a short taxi ride to the gate. If you are coming from farther out, tell us where you are staying when you message and we will tell you honestly how long it takes at 6:15 in the morning.
Message +506 8514 1361 on WhatsApp with your date, how many adults and children, and which of the four options you want, or open the December and January booking page and start there. A real person answers, tells you whether that date is still open, and reminds you when your SINAC window opens if it has not yet.
If you are still deciding between options, compare them side by side on the Manuel Antonio National Park guided tour page, which lists what each tour covers in full.
For one non-resident adult in December 2026 or January 2027, the realistic all-in cost of a guided morning in Manuel Antonio National Park is $48.08 on the Classic Group option, $83.08 on Premium, $87.08 on Classic Private, and $118.08 on V.I.P. Private — each of those is the tour price plus the $18.08 SINAC ticket. Add a few dollars for a taxi to the gate and water, and that is the whole day. No booking fee, no fuel surcharge, no “promotion” that expires at midnight.