Our Agency

Paprika Tours is a local French-speaking travel agency based in Peru, offering tailor-made private trips in Peru and Bolivia.

History

The agency was founded in 2006 in Arequipa under the name Pérou Insolite. It grew quickly to become a leading agency for private and small-group French-language travel in Peru. In 2010, we opened a branch in Bolivia to expand our activity into that country. It was at this point that the agency changed its name and became Paprika Tours.

Organization

When you contact our travel agency, by email or phone, your request is handled by one of our travel advisors. They are French speakers living in Peru. Their job is to design a tailor-made private trip with you and give you all the advice and information you need about the regions you'd like to visit.

As soon as you've booked your trip, our operations team takes over to book hotels, transport and guides and organize the various services. The bookings team works from the agency's head office in Arequipa (Peru).

Finally, once you're on the ground, in Peru or Bolivia, you'll meet our French-speaking coordinators in the main cities, such as Arequipa, Puno and La Paz. These are agency staff responsible for coordinating and overseeing services locally, as well as assisting our travelers and giving them insider tips as they pass through each city. Having French-speaking coordinators in the main cities is a hallmark of our travel agency and an investment in the comfort and safety of our travelers, particularly those on an unaccompanied private trip.

Discover our team!

When booking a trip online, make sure the local agency legally exists. Companies in Peru are identified by a RUC number (Registro Unico de Contribuyente) registered with SUNAT (Superintendencia Nacional de Administración Tributaria). They must also hold a municipal operating license and a license from the ministry of tourism.

Below you will find a copy of our operating license, our tourism license, and our RUC. You can also verify our company's existence on the SUNAT website by entering our RUC number (20558033313) on the following page.

We hope not to disappoint anyone, but honesty compels us to admit that we don't plant a tree for every client who arrives, and that since we started operating, we haven't saved a single whale yet.

Knowing the realities of tourism up close, we don't wish to follow most of our competitors and colleagues on the sustainable-fair-eco-responsible tourism creed. In most cases, we're not convinced that, behind these values that travel agencies trumpet so loudly, there is much more than a fashionable discourse and easy marketing.

Furthermore, we believe that the responsibility of a for-profit company (let's own that ugly word!) should not lie in the social, environmental or humanitarian actions it may occasionally carry out on the side of its business, but rather in the way it carries out its core activity. In plain terms, our responsibility as a company is to try to do our job as well as possible, not to save the planet.

To achieve this goal, we follow three main principles: respecting our commitments, transparency and legality.

We owe respecting our commitments first and foremost to our clients. With us, there's no confusion — we always honor the services included in the program and the terms and conditions. For this, it's important that these are described precisely and transparently.

That's why our programs are very detailed. The type of service for an excursion, private or shared, the guide's language, whether the site entrance fee is included or not (and if not, the price to pay on site), the planned hotel with photos and a link to the hotel's website — all these details are provided for each day.

Our terms and conditions of sale are provided with every program, and are of course also available on our website. These terms clearly state our obligations and those of our clients, as well as their limitations. We are not fans of fine print and prefer instead to lay out the facts from the start.

Transparency is also very important when it comes to reviews from our past clients. As we explain on the page dedicated to our hotels, the temptation is strong for a company to give itself a free little boost with a fake review on a travel forum. At Paprika Tours, we make it a point of honor to resist this temptation. We never post fake reviews on forums. Likewise, the reviews on our website are not edited. Criticism and other "downsides" are not censored.

We believe they are part of the information our future clients are entitled to receive, and that in the long run, they are also positive for us since they push us to keep improving.

Finally, legality is the third important pillar of this foundation. Our company is legal not only because it holds the required permits (see our Legal Information page), which is not so common in Peru and Bolivia, but above all because our accounting is entirely legal, which is even rarer. Likewise, all Paprika Tours staff are under formal contract, in a country where nearly 70% of workers are "informal", as it's called here, meaning undeclared.

Beyond the social contribution that paying taxes can represent (30% corporate tax in Peru, 25% in Bolivia) and social contributions (9% for Essalud, the equivalent of social security, around 10% for CTS, "compensación por tiempos de servicios", which acts somewhat like unemployment insurance), for our clients, compliance with our legal obligations guarantees our commitment to our promises, the stability of our team, and our resilience in the face of any potential tax audits.

We're well aware that none of this is as "cool" or catchy as sponsoring a panda. But this is undoubtedly what has allowed us, for years, despite the economic crisis and ever-stronger competition, to have thousands of satisfied clients who come back or recommend us to their friends. And that is a result we're still a little proud of.