I was wondering how most of you engage in overseas birding trips. Do you book with tour companies? Or with guides? Or go on your own?
Many of the tour companies seem to be really expensive, so I'm interested in finding out if booking with a guide would be a cheaper way of doing this.
Booking directly with local guides is usually indeed much cheaper than through international companies.
If you book through a internationally operating company, you minimise the need for research and preparation (basically look up the catalogue and choose), you have the convenience and security to make business with someone in your country and speaking your language. You have the peace of mind to be taken care of by a company with long experience and high standards, who will go to lentghs to sort out any problems you may encounter. You also usually have a guide speaking your language. International tour operators usually cooperate with local companies, who do all the local logistics and provide the guide. So you pay for the local guide, the international guide, the local company, the international company and all this adds up of course.
If you deal directly with local guides, you cut on a lot of the costs listed above, but of course you need to do more research and organisation yourself. You have to make business (including sending advance payments) with someone in a fareaway country and possible through some language barrier. And you have more risks of course, depending how much information you find about the guide. If you go with a individual guide who hasn't a local operator behind him, he might also be less able to sort out logistics troubles or similar for you. But, as others say above, you are more flexible to get exactly what you want and with smaller groups as well.
Then there is complete self organisation, which is doable in most countries. You just need to do all preparation yourself, including site gen. In the country, you will inevitably spend some time figuring out logistics instead of being birding. If you don't know the birds there very well, you will loose a good percentage of birds a guide could have found for you. But it's cheap, and if you have the time, birding skills and willingness to prepare and get through locally by yourself , its the most rewarding way I guess.
So it's all a function of your personal preference, your time and money available.