Now I'm intrigued at the idea of doing this on our own. How did you divide up your stay and which excursions did you do at each home base? I'm trying to get an idea of what activities are closest to each stop/hotel. What hotels did you stay at?
We are interested in.... Rafting (scenic and possibly white water), a rainforest hike to see wildlife, chocolate and/or coffee experience, zip lining, the waterfall, the suspension bridges, hot springs and a beach day.
When we first booked this trip, we'd envisioned a resort stay with some excursions, and so with our "vacation fund" stuffed to the gills with us not traveling for nearly 3 years due to the pandemic, I booked us for eight nights at the Four Seasons Papagayo. When I started to look into the things we wanted to do/see, I realized that a lot of the excursions were 5-6 hours round trip in a car to get to the rainforest (on the coast it's a dry rainforest) to see the volcano, sloths, waterfalls....etc. And so with the actual activity, it was like 10-12 hour days. Too long.
At that point, we switched it up and settled on five nights at the Four Seasons (they had a stay five pay for four deal, so less than five would have been a waste) and three up at La Fortuna where the volcano is, the hanging bridges and the river safari. Again, up there...we chose the Nayara Tented Camp, which as I said earlier, was spectucular, but it's pricey.
With the Four Seasons or the Andaz (which I believe is a Marriott property in case you have points).....you're a bit isolated on the peninsula, however we really enjoyed it. We did also hire a boat/driver on our own to take us out for a three hour tour (haha...really was that long) to snorkel and take us into the mangroves...right from the beach. There are no private beaches in Costa Rica, and so vendors would gather on a part of the beach to sell boating excursions, massages and also sell jewelry...etc. But they stayed to one side of the beach and weren't intrusive. Lots of people would hire one of the boat guys to take them across the bay over to Coco and Hermosa Beach (popular area to stay). We decided we wanted to do up to 1/2 day excursions and the other half day to enjoy the resort. So that plan worked for us both on the coast, and up at Arenal, which is where the true rainforest is. They also had "The Explorers" out there for anyone wanting to zip line, do ATVs, mountain bike...etc. But I'm betting you can do that stuff all over Costa Rica.
I think 4 days on the coast was enough, but would have loved another 1-2 days up at Arenal as there were more fun excursions/hikes that I would have really enjoyed. I definitely think you can plan this trip yourself. It's just a matter if you want to self-drive like jalapeño_pretzel did, or use resorts as a base as we did and hire transportation. We used Tucan Limo Services for pick-up at Liberia Airport, transport to our beach resort, pick-up and transport out to La Fortuna (Arenal area), pick-up at La Fortuna out to airport. It was about 7 hours in total for the three trips and each time had a private driver in a nice, new vehicle (Toyota Land Cruiser)....for a total of $565, which we felt was a very fair price. My husband didn't want to drive on this trip.
However, as you can see...I believe jalapeño_pretzel covered more ground by driving themselves....just a matter of what you'd like to see/do. And you can spend far, far less on resorts....and have the same amazing time. Up in the Arenal area there were lots of resorts we saw that had their own thermal springs on property. And there were places to access them for a fee. Again, we loved this trip....and because it's a quick 5 hour direct flight from Newark, can see us going back again and again. Our flight landed at around noon on our arrival day, and the drive to the resort was about 50 minutes.....if you decided on Coco or Hermosa it's only about 35 minutes. Our flight back was at 2pm, and so we had a 9am pick up which got us back to the airport at 11:30am...plenty of time to make our flight, so we didn't need to do any hotel nights near the airport on either day.
Waking up at 6am after our first night and being greeted at our hotel window by a capuchin monkey staring at our fruit basket through the window was our first wildlife sighting....and from there we saw amazing animals every day. My husband got this shot of a family down at the beach later that day.
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, and just had such an amazing time there with incredible service that we're checking out their resort in Bocas Del Toro in Panama this January. 
