How much does it cost a long distance bus in Perù? What kind of services and conditions could you expect? Which are the biggest bus companies? In this post we will summarize our experience (period: August 2017).
BUS COMPANIES IN PERU (not only Peru Hop and Cruz del Sur)
In Perù there’s really a wide range of bus companies. Among the bigger ones Cruz del Sur, Oltursa, Civa, Tepsa, Movil Tours. Besides these you have many other options of companies that offer journeys only for some specific parts of Perù.
When we looked for information about bus companies in Perù (before coming here) we had the impression that many travel blogs strongly recommended to use either Cruz del Sur or another company called Perù Hop (example 1, example 2, example 3). Why? These blogs claim that traveling by bus in Perù could be dangerous (stories of stolen belongings on the bus, hijacked buses, accidents because of tired drivers….) and that using these companies you would have less to worry about, besides other reasons. As you can see from our summary table below, we have never used either Cruz del Sur or Peru Hop and we can say that most of journey were pretty good even though not always the most comfortable… for sure we paid much less than if we had used these two companies (keep reading, there will be more comments about Peru Hop and Cruz del Sur below).
Focusing on our experience (with Cromotex, Econo-CIVA, Soyuz, Julio Cesar, El Sol, Azuay), the conditions of the buses were typically better than what we experienced in Bolivia. All the buses had working toilets on board except Soyuz. Julio Cesar had the best buses (with a snack included in the price) while the buses of Cromotex and El Sol were a bit older (but acceptable). Our worse experience was probably the one with Econo-CIVA, because the seats were small (standard seats, no SEMI CAMA) and we traveled for more than 12 hours overnight… it was too uncomfortable for such a long time, we would have preferred a SEMI CAMA. None of the buses we took had a working Wi-Fi connection nor power sockets.
ROADS CONDITIONS IN PERU
Perù has more paved highways than Bolivia, but still some unpaved and bumpy roads exist. All the roads in our itinerary (see below) were good with the exception of the road from Huaraz to Trujillo: it was so bumpy that we couldn’t sleep. Before coming to Perù we read that there are three main routes to go from Cusco to Lima and we planned our itinerary choosing the route with the best roads (the one passing through Arequipa). If you want to know more about this topic click here.
Examples of bus prices in Perù (our experience)
We traveled in Perù from Cusco to Mancora and in average we paid 0.024 euro (0.093 PEN) per Km. All the details in the following table. The prices are per person.
Similarly as we did in Bolivia, we tried to buy tickets in the middle/low price range. In some cases we could find even cheaper prices, but we decided not to try them (using good common sense, if the related companies didn’t “look” reliable enough). In average we paid half the price that we would have paid traveling with Cruz del Sur (the most expensive company in Perù). For instance a SEMI-CAMA seat with Cruz del Sur, to go from Cusco to Arequipa would cost around 100 PEN (we paid 40 PEN with Cromotex), from Arequipa to Ica is around 90 PEN (we paid 50 PEN with Econo-CIVA) and Lima-Huaraz around 80 PEN (we paid 40 PEN with Julio Cesar). The most expensive bus we took was the one to cross the Ecuador border: besides the fact that crossing borders can make the price of the bus higher, we paid this ticket a bit more than normal (it should cost $50 instead of $65) because we bought it from a travel agency and not from the bus company main office. We never tried to negotiate the price of the tickets but other travelers succeeded in doing it (though only with the smaller bus companies).
Buying bus tickets from internet in Perù
We bought tickets from internet only once, using the website redbus.pe and we could pay by credit card. We noticed that this website doesn’t propose you all the available options that you can find at the terminals. The website of the biggest bus companies typically have an online booking system that should allow you to pay by credit card, but we never tried them. It is worth to mention that Cruz del Sur offers a limited number of seats at a discounted fare: they are called Tarifa INSUPERABLE and Tarifa de ocasión. If you plan your journey in advance you may be able to get these tickets, buying them from internet. According to our experience these discounts were never available at the terminals for journeys bought on the same day or the day before.
Is “Peru Hop” economically worth compared to traveling with normal buses?
After the previous discussions about Cruz del Sur now let’s focus on “Peru Hop”. I begin answering the question, “is Peru Hop economically worth”? My answer is NO, let’s see why. This company offers a service of Semi-Cama buses from Cusco to Lima with intermediate stops in Puno, Arequipa, Nazca, Ica, Huacachina, Paracas, Chincha: you pay a single ticket and you can take their bus between these destinations whenever you want (“Hop on and hop off”). The validity of the ticket is 1 year. Moreover this bus service includes a tourist guide on-board and few more fancy things (you can give a look to their website for all the details).
Before coming to Perù we read several blogs recommending this service, mainly for safety reasons but also for the extra tourist-oriented services they offer. At the time we didn’t know many details about the real costs of buses in Perù and we wondered if this option could be cost-effective. The cost of their tickets ranges between 199 and 159 USD. The option which is closer to the itinerary we did is their intermediate one, which costs 179 USD (150 Euro) .
We used normal buses to go from Cusco to Lima, passing by Arequipa, Ica and Pisco and we paid a total of 29.35 euro. Going from Ica to Huacachina by taxi costs no more than 10 soles (round trip) and going from Pisco to Paracas by collettivos costs 10 soles (round trip) … so 29.35 euro + 20 soles (5.2 euro) = 34.55 euro. As you can see Peru Hop is more than 4 times more expensive than what we paid for our trip (34.55 euro versus 150 euro).
There are other blogs, like this, stating that Peru Hop is cost effective compared to traveling on the same itinerary with Cruz del Sur (the most expensive company): according to our experience (see above), taking SEMI-CAMA seats with Cruz del Sur would cost twice the price that we paid taking cheaper companies, so in this case the same itinerary as Peru Hop would cost around 70/80 euro… CAMA seats with Cruz del Sur cost around 30 PEN more than the SEMI-CAMA ones, so even if we consider the CAMA seats the whole itinerary would cost no more than 100/110 euro. Thus even Cruz del Sur is definitely cheaper than Peru Hop (you can pay 50 euro less and you can make all your journeys on the top class CAMA seats of the best company in Perù).
Consider one last thing: many of the blogs that strongly recommend to use Peru Hop are actually sponsored by Peru Hop (they received some compensation from them). Anyway, we didn’t use Perù Hop and we can’t say anything about the quality of their service: our analysis was merely economical. You may be convinced to travel with them because of their special services, but be aware that you are going to spend more.
Into the Kiwi 