Most Costa Rica trip planning goes the same way: pick your regions, book a fixed tour in each one, string them together, and hope the connections work out. It’s a reasonable approach, and it’s also the reason a lot of trips feel like a checklist by day four.
The alternative isn’t “no plan”. It’s a plan that can still move. That means booking transport and lodging with enough structure to actually work, while leaving the day-to-day activities loose enough to change if the weather turns, if you’re more tired than expected, or if a place turns out to be worth a second day.
In practice, that looks like telling a local contact roughly what you want out of each region (wildlife, quiet, activity, food) instead of pre-selecting the exact tour six weeks out from a listing you can’t ask questions about. You lose a small amount of certainty. You gain the ability to actually respond to the trip you’re having instead of the one you booked in advance.
If you’re three days out from a region and still haven’t decided what to do there, that’s not a planning failure. That’s just leaving room for the trip to adapt to you.