Now and then we’ll get e-mails from readers asking why we don’t review rental villas in Latin America since we cover hotels. Their point being, for groups or families, renting a villa or a condo makes a lot more sense than staying in a hotel since there’s more space, a kitchen, and maybe a private cook.

They’re right of course, but for us it’s a matter of that being more than we can manage. If we just covered Los Cabos or the west coast of Costa Rica, it might be doable. We’re Luxury Latin America though, bringing you the best of the best from the Rio Grande down to the tip of Patagonia. Getting a handle on the constantly shifting villa rental scene on two continents would be impossible to do in a thorough way.

That doesn’t mean we’ll ignore rental homes completely though. Our new luxury tour feature this week is on a villa vacation in Costa Rica, on the Pacific Coast near Jaco.

Our correspondent set up a short villa stay with activities through Mead Brown, an agency that specializes in high-end rental property in Costa Rica. You simply tell the agency what you’re looking to do and they’ll take care of all the arrangements. In this case, it was golf, ziplining, horseback riding, and getting up close and personal with huge crocodiles.

Michael Steinberger runs Latin Tour Dimensions, a company that is known for its custom tours in Central America and South America, trips that are “complex, in-depth, and expensive.”  I interviewed him to find out what kinds of travel trends he is seeing. We talked about the changing face of tourism, what destinations are hot, and how a travel agent is like a doctor making a diagnosis. A short version of the interview is here, with the rest of it continued after the jump.

What kinds of trends are you seeing in Latin America? What has changed?
On the destination side, Argentina has been crazy–it’s off the map. Whereas every second request used to be Costa Rica, now every second request is Argentina. Plus people are staying longer and doing more. It used to just be Iguazu Falls, Buenos Aires, Bariloche, and then over to Chile. Now people are doing long custom tours of just Argentina and going to Mendoza for wine tours. They’re going beyond Bariloche to Calafate. In Chile, travelers are branching out beyond the well-worn path.

We are also getting a lot more upscale family tour requests now, with soft adventure activities and requests for a different kind of hotel style, one with a real sense of place. It’s a bonding experience.

There has also been a clear shift in what people want to experience when they travel. Before, people went to cities in Europe to see buildings, to Africa to see animals, to Asia to see monuments. But then the baby boomers really got hooked on experiential vacations. They decided they wanted to go to Tikal, Machu Picchu, and remote jungles, to see ancient civilizations. That’s what put Latin America on the map because we have it all. We saw that early on and embraced it. People who travel to Central and South America are well-versed travelers who are looking for more.

Give me some examples of some unusual requests you’ve been able to fulfill.
We do all kinds of adventure activities, but the toughest one to get together was a wine and gourmet tour across Chile and Argentina. We got the request from four couples in New York that had various wine and restaurant connections in their jobs. They knew their stuff and wanted a true gourmet experience. So we called in chefs to take them to market and cook for them, got them into the best restaurants, and had them meet with top winemakers. The challenge was that there wasn’t a structure already set up for this by anyone else. We had to find the right small local suppliers in each place to make it seamless, with the same high level of service throughout.

We also had one family from London that was very involved in polo and horses, so we needed to line up estancias around Argentina that would satisfy them, going beyond the surface level offerings to put them together with real horse people. We welcome challenges like these though. We really enjoy doing them because it shows we’re better equipped than the paint-by-number tour groups offering very similar programs.

See the rest of the interview with Latin Tour Dimension’s Michael Steinberger.