Who owns the adventure? The rise of women-led tour operators reshaping Latin American travel

There is a photograph Lixayda Vásquez keeps from the first time she stood on top of Ausangate. She was twenty-three. She had begun climbing four years earlier, not in a gym, not on a course, but by walking up to a group of rock climbers she had seen in Cusco and asking what they were doing. Ausangate is 6,384 metres. On a clear morning from the summit, the Quechua-speaking villages of the Vilcanota range are visible below: her childhood, suddenly very small. What most people see in the picture is a young woman in a down jacket on a snowfield. What she saw was a map of where she had come from.

A decade later, Lixayda is a senior mountain guide with Mountain Lodges of Peru, a co-founder of the Cusco-based women's climbing collective Chicas de Alturas, and a member of the first all-Peruvian women's expedition to attempt Manaslu, 8163 meters in the Karakoram, without sherpas, without supplemental oxygen. She is not, in her own description of herself, an activist. She is a guide. But the shape of her career, self-taught, Quechua-speaking, operator-employed, collectively organized, is also, quietly, the shape of an industry reorganizing itself.

The blind spot in "responsible tourism"

For a decade, the adventure travel industry has trained travelers to ask one question before they book: is this operator verified? It is the right question. Latin America's market has long been flooded with informal actors, unlicensed guides, unregistered operators, sold-on-to-a-cousin itineraries, and verification has been the single most important upgrade to traveller safety in the region.

But verification answers a compliance question. It tells you whether the people running your expedition have insurance, permits, and a track record. It does not tell you who owns the business, who gets paid, and whose decisions shape the trek. Those are different questions, and until recently they have been difficult to answer. Ownership is not a line item on a permit.

In 2026 that has started to change. A distinct class of women-led expedition businesse,  founded, owned, or crewed by women, has become large enough to track as a category, not a curiosity. Some of them you can already book through verified operators curated on Outer. The more interesting story is how they got here, and what they imply for the next decade of Latin American adventure travel.

Field portrait: Lixayda Vásquez and the rise of Chicas de Alturas

Lixayda grew up in a Quechua-speaking family in the Cusco region. Her first language is Quechua; her second is Spanish; her third, accumulated across a decade of foreign clients, is functional English. She is, in the technical sense that matters to anyone booking a guided expedition in Peru, a trilingual high-altitude mountain guide. That combination is rarer than it sounds.

She learned to climb the way many working guides in the Andes have: informally, at first, by attaching herself to people who already knew how. After her summit of Ausangate, she began accumulating peaks steadily, the glaciated ridges of the Cordillera Vilcanota, the long passes of the Salkantay trek, the Lares valleys. By her late twenties she was leading multi-day lodge-to-lodge traverses for Mountain Lodges of Peru, one of the most established operators in the Sacred Valley.

In 2016, together with two climbing friends, she co-founded Chicas de Alturas, Altitude Girls, a collective of Cusco-based women climbers who had been struggling to find partners for technical routes. What started as a WhatsApp group became a recognised community, now profiled by Flash Pack, the Mountain Research Initiative and GlacierHub. 

She is, to be clear, not the exception. She is the recognizable tip of a larger shift: the number of working female guides, porters, and operator-side decision-makers in the Andes has grown every year since 2016, and the Adventure Travel Trade Association's own industry reporting has begun tracking it as a structural trend rather than a feel-good story.

Who actually owns a Latin American adventure business?

Here is the problem the industry has been slower to confront. Walk the plaza in Huaraz or Puerto Natales and count the operators; ownership is often one or two degrees removed from the people you meet at the counter. Some operators are foreign-owned, European or North American outfitters who sub-contract to local guides. Some are locally owned but family-run in ways that exclude women from capital decisions. Some are co-operatives. Some are one-person businesses that exist mostly on WhatsApp.

Until recently, no one was publishing reliable numbers on what share of these businesses were owned, led, or majority-staffed by women. The most credible current estimates, drawn from industry analyses published by the Adventure Travel Trade Association and Condé Nast Traveler's coverage of women-led operators, put the figure in Latin American adventure travel at somewhere between a fifth and a quarter, and rising. That is low. It is also moving in the right direction for the first time in the region's modern tourism history.

Why the movement matters isn't abstract. Ownership structure shapes three things travelers actually feel on the ground: who is guiding them, how the guide is paid, and where the profit goes after the trip ends.

Alpaca Expeditions and the all-female porter crew on the Salkantay

The cleanest example of ownership bleeding into traveller experience is Alpaca Expeditions, one of the largest Cusco-based operators and the most visible practitioner of an all-female porter model. The operation is straightforward: female porters paid the same rate as male porters, carrying the same weight within Peruvian regulatory limits, on the same itineraries. It sounds unremarkable when written down. In practice it required the operator to rebuild its kit: different tent sizing, different pack systems, trail logistics that accommodated traditional female porters who had been historically excluded from multi-day circuits not because they couldn't carry, but because the industry's infrastructure had been designed around men. Adventure.com's reporting on female porters has documented the knock-on effects, longer-term career paths for porters who had previously been confined to day trips, income flowing to families in the Sacred Valley, and a recognizable shift in who travelers actually meet on the trail.

Travelers booking the Salkantay through Alpaca are not paying a premium for a women-led porter crew. They are paying the same rate they would pay any well-regulated operator on that route. The difference is structural, not cosmetic.

Mapuche women's cooperatives and what "guide" means in rural Patagonia

Seventeen hundred kilometres south, the story reshapes itself around a different question: what does "guiding" even mean in a region where Indigenous knowledge is the primary resource? The Mapuche people, whose ancestral territory runs across both sides of the modern Chilean-Argentine border in the Lake District and northern Patagonia, have been running community-based tourism programmes for more than two decades. In the last five years, a growing number of these programmes have been organized as women's cooperatives: matriarchal in structure, collectively managed, and explicitly designed to keep revenue inside the community.

What travelers actually experience is not a packaged "cultural visit". It is closer to a home-stay with structured days: working with weavers, learning about medicinal plants, horse-back days on terrain that outside guides cannot navigate without Mapuche consent, cooking sopaipillas over a wood fire. The women running these cooperatives are guides in every operational sense of the word, they are making the route decisions, handling logistics, and holding the liability, but their role resists the industry's usual vocabulary, because the knowledge they are offering was never professionalized in the Western mountaineering sense. It was inherited.

Booking these experiences through a verified platform matters more here than anywhere else in the region. The cooperatives themselves rarely have the digital infrastructure to market internationally; when travelers do find them, it is almost always through an intermediary. Outer's cultural and community-based tourism category was explicitly designed to make that bridge traversable without stripping the cooperatives of ownership over the experience they are selling.

The economics: how female ownership changes pay, porter loads, and community reinvestment

The reason ownership structure matters is that it changes the flow of money, and the flow of money changes what a traveller actually gets. Three effects are now well documented.

First, reinvestment. Studies of gender and tourism economics, including work published by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, consistently show that female-led tourism businesses in Latin America reinvest a higher share of their profit into community infrastructure: schooling, healthcare, intergenerational cooperative pools. The effect compounds across a decade in ways that verification audits do not capture, but repeat travelers can feel.

Second, pay structure. Female-led operators, on the whole, run flatter compensation schedules, smaller spreads between senior guide and porter pay, and are more likely to include porters in seasonal bonus structures. That is not universal. But the trend is real and visible in the ATTA's industry survey data.

Third, booking patterns. Female travelers, who are, across every reliable dataset, the majority of adventure travel bookers in the 25-to-55 demographic, book female-led operators at rates three to four times higher when the information is made visible to them at the point of decision. This is the single biggest structural reason the category has grown: demand has always been there; discoverability has not.

Ecuador's Galápagos: the quiet expansion of female-led expedition programmes

The Galápagos archipelago is usually discussed as a conservation story. It is also, more quietly, one of the clearest case studies of female-led expedition growth in Latin America. Rebecca Adventure Travel, founded and run by Rebecca Ruibal in Quito, has spent the last decade building a network of female-guided Galápagos programmes that now operate at scale, employing women across the logistics chain from naturalist guides to boat captains to expedition leaders. The programmes are not marketed primarily on their gender composition. They are marketed on the quality of the naturalist guiding. The gender composition is simply what happens when a female founder prioritizes recruiting from communities she already knows.

How travellers can book women-led, without virtue-signalling

The last step is practical. If you want your Latin American expedition booked, guided, and economically anchored by women, the three questions that actually work are these.

One: ask the operator directly, what percentage of your guides, porters, and senior staff are women, and who owns the business? Most operators will answer honestly when asked. The answer tells you more than any certification.

Two: look for cooperatives and named collectives, not marketing copy. Chicas de Alturas, the Mapuche women's cooperatives of the Lake Region, the Quechua-women weavers-turned-guides in the Sacred Valley, these are real entities with real governance. "Women's empowerment tours" with no named women attached are often the opposite.

Three: use a discovery platform that makes ownership structure visible before you book. That is precisely the design intent behind Outer: verification plus transparency, not verification alone. It is also the reason the women-led category will keep growing faster than the industry's headline figures suggest.

And finally: when you meet Lixayda, or the dozens of guides like her across the Andes, Patagonia, the Galápagos, and the Amazon, do not book her because you want to support a woman in the mountains. Book her because she is a very good guide, and because the trek she will lead you on will be better for having been led by her. The story underneath, her Quechua, her Ausangate summit, her Manaslu rope, the collective she helped build from a WhatsApp group, is the part of the adventure you will remember once the photographs have faded.

She doesn't need to be an empowerment story. She already is the story.