A friend and I just completed the 6-nite/7-day Torres del Paine Trek booked through the company, Patagonia Adventure Trip -http://patagoniaadventuretrip.com/
I would have to give our overall experience an unfavorable review - the only exception to this being our actual Chilean trail guide (not the tour leader). He was excellent. My friend and I each paid $894 - not including airfare - and I'd say the trip we got was worth far less. To be honest, other members of the group didn't seem to have the same issues we had with the services, so please read the facts I include below and decide for yourself if the company (and this Torres excursion in particular) is for you...
1) Patagonia Adventure Trip does not accept credit cards. They insist on a wire transfer or a check sent directly to the owner's bank in Florida. We asked the company rep 2-3 weeks in advance about payment method, which would have been plenty of time for us to send a check and avoid the wire transfer fee. Unfortunately, the rep ignored my question until it was too late to send checks in time for them to clear prior to departure. So we each got stuck with the pricey wire transfer fee; this could have been totally avoidable had the rep communicated back in a timely fashion.
2) Patagonia Adventure Trip isn't actually the company that leads the tour. The company you travel with is called "Camino Abierto". Your tour leader is a Camino Abierto rep, and Patagonia Adventure Trip is simply an online trip broker. They didn't inform us of that fact, so when we got to the airport at El Calafate, the driver completely confused us by telling us he was sent to pick us up by "Camino Abierto".
3) Even Camino Abierto itself doesn't actually provide the majority of the services. Travel to/from Chile is by public bus that they book for you (think LONG lines at the border). They hire the smaller buses that take you in and around the park too, so you're beholden to whatever the schedule is of the transportthat they hire. The boat that you take across Lake Pehoe is also a scheduled public ferry service, so you also find yourself being herded onto the boat along with droves of other people. They don't supply any of the food or beverage that's included in the package either. Food is provided mainly by the company that caters the campsites in the park (see item #7 below for more info on the food).
4) Read the itinerary closely. The 7-day / 6-nite tour actually amounts to 3.25 days actually spent in the park. What they count as Day 1 and Day 7 are just the days you arrive and the day you depart from El Calafate, respectively. Day 2 and 6 are devoted primarily to 5-6 hour rides on a public bus to/from Puerto Natales, Chile although there is a small hike in the park on Day 2.
5) Our tour leader from Camino Abierto was very young and inexperienced. On Day 1, she seemed more concerned with her boyfriend - another tour leader who happened to be in town at the same time - than with making herself available to us. The rest of the tour, we felt we were constantly having to ask for critical information about the day's itinerary instead of having our tour leader offer the information to us up front. At night, she would not offer information as to her whereabouts, e.g. "I'll be here (in this campsite/at this hostel) in case of emergency." She simply disappeared until the next morning. I never observed the tour leader (or the trail guide) carrying a first aid kit on the trail.
6) The camping in the park is far from the website's description of "first class facilities provided by the campsite: good and clean bathrooms and hot water showers..." The trash bins in each toilet stall seemed to pile up over a long time before being emptied. The floor was often wet and dirty. I never once had a hot shower. Furthermore, the tents are crammed closely together - little to no privacy - and under your sleeping bag is a hard rubber mat. At the very least, bring a Therma-rest if you want to sleep comfortably.
7) If you want nutrition, it will cost you extra. The quality of the food we were given to eat in the park was downright insulting - moldy bread, half-rotting fruit and too much chocolate. This is what got to me the most. We were doing extremely physically challenging things each day (12 miles on Day 3, 18 miles on Day 4), and yet the food provided had little nutritional value. Breakfast was white bread, cereal with milk, fruit and yogurt. That was ok, except the fruit was often starting to rot, or sitting next to rotted fruit in the bowl. Also, I personally had a hard time digesting any of the milk, yogurt (and cheese), so I pretty much ended up loading up on white bread with margarine every morning. The "box lunch" they gave us for the trail consisted of a sandwich with a thin amount of meat/cheese on the same bread we had for breakfast, one mushy piece of fruit, one cereal bar and two chocolate bars. My sandwich bread was moldy on one of the days. These were the calories they expected us to use to complete the long hikes each day. When I commented to the tour leader that I didn't want to eat the chocolate on the trail and end up with sugar burnout, her response was "Chocolate has caffeine, so it shouldn't make you tired." The worst offense was on the night we got back from our first long day of hiking. All they gave us for dinner was some sort of beef schnitzel-type of entree with a pile o' mashed potatoes. When we saw other diners in the camp cantina eating vegetables, we were told we'd have to pay extra if we wanted vegetables with our dinner. If nutrition is important to you, bring your own snacks, or at least a multi-vitamin. ;)
8) Apart from a small 8oz bottle of water you get each day with your box lunch, the company does not provide purified water. Water is sold at the campsites (US$3 for an 8oz bottle) and you have the option of buying it, drinking the water from the campground sinks, or filling up on water directly from streams. This made me very nervous, because I just didn't know if a puma or guanaco might have done its business upstream. Also it didn't help that, only the week before, the tour leader had 13 members of her group get sick in El Chalten from drinking water tainted by an algal bloom. The sick ones had to be carried off the trail by mule. Still, the guides swore up and down the water in Torres was safe for drinking. They insisted no one had ever gotten sick from the water on their trips (note: giardia gestates 1-2 weeks before symptoms show up). I did drink the water, but I just wasn't comfortable with it. Again, if you really want to travel with Patagonia Adventure Trip and if you're used to taking precautions about with your water, consider packing your H20 purification method of choice.
9) They try to pack super-long hikes into each day spent in the park, so you have to be prompt and you have to be fit in order to finish all the activities that are listed in the itinerary. (More than half the group opted to not finish the longest hike up the French Valley because they were simply too pooped to continue.) The trail guide walked very fast, simply because he knew we had to cover a lot of mileage in a day. For an example of just how rushed things could get, here is what we were told by our tour leader on Day 5: "The group should be on the trail by 8am. Breakfast starts being served at 7:30 and there are usually long lines at the cantina, so try to be in line for breakfast by 7:10." Incidentally, we all ended up standing in the breakfast line until 7:45 because the line was indeed crowded.
Torres del Paine, itself is beautiful. It's just that I found the whole arranged group tour very stressful and disorganized, which detracted greatly from my enjoyment of the park. Another poster ( http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g294276-i5357-k751436-Patagonia_Adventure_Trip-Patagonia.html )commented that PAT is "a huge organisation that is only concerned with making money and shoving people around in a way that is least costly and most convenient for them." I would have to agree with that description. Based on my experiences, I cannot recommend Patagonia Adventure Trip or Camino Abierto to anyone looking for an organized tour of the park.





