Affiliate disclosure

The short version: some links here earn us a commission, you pay the same either way, nobody pays to be featured, and the largest single cost of this trip pays us nothing at all.

Which links are affiliate links

Every "Check Price & Availability" button, and every in-text link that opens a trek listing, points to GetYourGuide or Viator and carries our partner tag. Four of the six treks are sold on Viator, two on GetYourGuide. If you book after clicking one, the platform pays us a share of the commission it already earns from the operator. Your price is identical to the price you would see going straight to that listing, because our cut comes out of the platform's margin and is never added to your ticket.

Those two platforms are the only affiliate relationships on this site. There are no lodge or hotel links, no display advertising, no sponsored posts and no paid reviews. The trek videos embedded on the homepage earn us nothing, and neither does the map of the Kinigi trailhead beside them. If a third network is ever added, this page and the footer disclosure will name it before the first link goes live, not after.

The $1,500 permit, which pays us nothing

This is the part worth saying plainly, because it is most of what you will spend. The gorilla permit costs $1,500 per foreign non-resident, it is set and sold by the Rwanda Development Board on its own portal, and not one cent of it reaches this site. We take no share of it whether you buy it yourself, whether a day-trek operator buys it for you against a passport copy, or whether it arrives folded inside a permit-included package. We are not agents for the RDB, we are not affiliated with it, and we cannot get you a permit, hold one, discount one or jump you up the queue.

That has an obvious consequence for our incentives, so here it is: the only part of your trip we can earn on is the tour itself, and those prices run from $260 to $3,746 across these six listings. We could quietly push the expensive end. Instead every price on this site states whether the permit is inside it, which is the fact that makes a $360 day trek and a $3,350 all-in day comparable at all, and which usually points readers toward the cheaper half. Separately, 10 percent of Rwanda's national park tourism revenue goes to the communities next to the parks under the Tourism Revenue Sharing Programme, raised from 5 percent in 2017 when the permit price went to $1,500.

What it does not change

• Inclusion. Every trek that clears the tests is here: a real gorilla or golden monkey experience in Volcanoes National Park, genuinely bookable right now by an individual with published dates, figures that survived two independent verification passes, and an unambiguous position on the $1,500 permit. Six listings cleared all four, run by five operators. One of those operators, Afri Safaris, appears twice, with two genuinely different days rather than the same day sold under two names.
• Ordering. No operator can buy a position and none has been offered one. Where a section leads with one trek, that trek is the most-reviewed in its section, a rule you can check yourself against the numbers on the cards.
• What we say about them. The 3-day safari carries 3 reviews and its card says 3 rather than burying it. The golden monkey listing has no rating at all yet, and the card says that too. The two permit-included packages are non-refundable, and the pages state it before they mention the lodges. None of that is the flattering way to sell a $3,746 booking.
• What we leave out. A seventh listing was dropped during checking: it advertised a gorilla trekking ticket at a price that could not be reconciled with the $1,500 permit, and an unclear permit position fails our first test. It would have paid commission exactly like the six we kept. Lodge-arranged treks sold only through a property's own reservations desk, and permits bought direct from the RDB portal, sit outside what this site compares, whatever they might be worth to us.
• Things we earn nothing from. The RDB portal, the $100 golden monkey permit bought on its own, the porters you hire at the trailhead for $10 to $20, the tips that follow them, and the Kwita Izina naming ceremony at Kinigi every September all pay us precisely zero. They still get their say in the guides wherever they beat a paid ticket.

Ratings, review counts and prices

Every rating and review count on this site is the platform's own published number at the time we checked it, read off the live listing and then confirmed a second time on an independent pass before it was printed. Nothing is averaged across platforms, rounded up or invented, and where the two checks disagreed the figure was left off the page rather than smoothed over. The six run 5.0 across 81 reviews, 4.9 across 37, 5.0 across 28, 5.0 across 11, 4.7 across 3, and one listing new enough to carry no rating at all.

Prices work the same way and come with a bigger caveat. What you see is a current from-price, the cheapest per-person option on that listing when it was read, running $260 to $3,746 across the lineup with the permit sometimes inside and sometimes not. What you actually pay moves with the date, the group size, the option you pick and the country you book from, so the live listing is always the authority. A price that reads differently in two places usually means the platform is showing you a localized currency, not that the operator has put its fee up. One of these six only resolved once its listing was rendered in US dollars, for exactly that reason.

If you would rather not use our links

Search the operator's name on GetYourGuide or Viator directly, or find the operator's own website and book there. Universal Ventures, Vista Safaris, Afri Safaris, Katona Tours and Travel and Nkuringo Safaris all sell these days themselves. And whatever you do about the trek, the permit is worth understanding on its own terms: it is sold first come, first served on the Rwanda Development Board's portal, at the same $1,500 whoever buys it. We would genuinely rather you got up the mountain. The comparisons, the cost table, the FAQ and the guides work exactly as well as research whether or not you ever click a booking link.

Questions about any of this: email us. How the listings are checked in the first place is on the about page.