Costa Rica Travel Review: Playa Hermosa & Monteverde Sunsets, Hanging Bridges, Zip-Lining, 8-Day Tour

If I could give 3.5 stars I would. Costa Rica is a gorgeous place and the people are wonderful. There were a lot of good things about our trip. There were some things that I would have expected to be better using a travel agent. This was our second trip using Zicasso.
Our travel planner is a nice lady who lives in Costa Rica so that is a plus. She has great connections with people. The people she chose for transportation were all wonderful. They were on time, spoke good English (our Spanish is weak) and were very friendly.
Communication is an area for improvement. We were sent a detailed itinerary when the trip was booked, then vouchers were provided for each hotel, transportation event, tour etc. The problem was that the itinerary was not updated so it did not match the vouchers, some of the times were different etc. so I had to keep texting our planner on the App for clarification. She responded quickly. The only time we had trouble was when we couldn't find our driver at the airport and she was not available as she was flying at the time. It got worked out but started things off a little stressful as I am a single woman traveling with my college age daughter. In one instance, the tour she booked said on the itinerary was for 5 hours and then after the first segment of the tour we were headed back after 2 hours and the transportation to the next town was scheduled for hours later. We had to check out of the hotel early in the morning for the rafting tour and it would have left us with nothing to do for hours at the resort in the rain. The travel planner was great in that she changed the transportation to a private van to take us earlier, but the stress would have have been needed if there hadn't been a mistake about the tour. We were also told it was much warmer in Monteverde than it was and we were not well advised how cold and wet it would truly be in the cloud forest, so we had to opt out of the afternoon hike to the hanging bridges because we were soaked and cold. We had rain jackets but nothing close to what gear we needed because of insufficient advice.
I chose this agency over the other one Zicasso offers because it was more budget friendly. The first two hotels were good, actually the one in Monteverde was phenomenal. The last stop was a beach resort in Guanacaste, at Playa Hermosa. The hotel was a huge miss. The bad vibes started with a hard sell on condos and trying to get us to visit a sister resort promising freebies and then not taking no for an answer. The rooms were not only dated but also in disrepair and the bed was super uncomfortable. The AC didn't work in the sitting room and even after calling no one came to fix it.  I was very surprised it was chosen especially since she said she had been there recently. Again the planner did an amazing job the next day moving us to another hotel which was truly phenomenal. Bottom line is, when we told her about a problem she did a great job fixing it but I felt like they could have been avoided. At one point she told us she was super busy and I understand it was high season but if you need help you should get it rather than telling people who have traveled abroad how busy you are.