I've been meaning to post about this for a few weeks but haven't sat down to do it, but here it goes. At the beginning of May, me and three friends went dove hunting in Argentina. We got the trip in August of 2020 almost through happenstance. I live in a Gulf Coast County in Southeast Texas, and my county's Ducks Unlimited chapter held their annual banquet and live auction online because of COVID. It also happened to be the weekend that Hurricane Laura was supposed to hit us so nobody was paying attention to the auction and we bought the trip for the minimum bid. Ultimately, we think it might have saved us $750 at most, but it was definitely the impetus for us to go.
Two of us had some trouble getting down there (United delayed our overnight flight from Houston to Buenos Aires by 12 hours, making it a day flight and turning our 4-hour layover from BA to Cordoba into a 12-hour layover where we had to spend a night in BA and causing us to miss almost a full day of sightseeing in Cordoba), but once our outfitter picked us up at the Cordoba airport, the experience was fantastic.
Our lodge was about an hour and a half from the airport, but they took us straight to the field to start hunting. We all shot 20 gauge Benelli Montefeltros--two of ours being brand new--that we rented from the lodge. The bird boys (men) were all fantastic and reloaded our shotguns for us (I'm still not sure how I feel about that). They built nice blinds each day and had plenty of beer for us while we hunted. Each day we had a 7:00 wakeup call followed by breakfast and a ~30 minute drive to the field. We would usually hunt for about 3-3.5 hours then break for lunch. The would cook lunch for us in the field then serve it to us at a table under a tent with beer and wine. After, they had hammocks and cots set up for us to nap for about an hour before the afternoon hunt.
After we hunted, they would take us back to the lodge, which was an experience itself. They had a fully stocked bar, a full menu for us to order from, a hot tub. They also had a masseuse available and dry cleaning. We almost wished we had an afternoon off so that we could relax there.
On the hunting, we had all heard stories about people shooting 1,000 birds a day, but frankly we didn't see those flights. Each of us budgeted to shoot 1,000 shells a day, but we all ended up shooting half that. Having said that, we all agreed that was a nice, steady pace and weren't upset by it at all. Anymore would've been work. The bird boys picked up as many dove as the could after we hunted, which they cleaned and donated to local schools.
In all, each of us spent about $5,500 on the trip including airfare, with the costs spread out over almost two years. I would recommend doing it once and can see myself doing it again several years from now. I would use the same outfitter but stay at a different lodge, only to get a little different of an experience.