Choosing a travel company by looking at a website can be tough. We hope this will help you decide whether Matueté is right for you. We are widely recognized by leading industry specialists as the best Brazilian luxury travel company. In operation since 2002, we employ a team of very well qualified professionals, based out of Sao Paulo with operations all over Brazil. Here is what we think makes us different, but we also encourage you to find out what the press has to say about us…
Luxury travel has changed tremendously in the last 30 years. Whereas in the past, luxury was synonymous with ´expensive´, nowadays luxury is much more related with what is ‘rare’. We therefore specialize in taking our travelers beyond the traditional mass tourism circuit, and expose them to once-in-a-lifetime experiences, rather than simply helping them choose the right hotel and booking standard sight seeing tours.
If there is one thing that unites all our guests, is that they are all extremely well travelled and have lived special experiences in all the places they have visited. By entrusting Matueté with the planning of your journey, you are making a conscious decision to abandon the need to find the cheapest deal; rather you are choosing to travel in style and to have things done with great attention to detail and professionalism.
More and more travelers want to get under the skin of the country they visit and meet real people outside the mass tourist circuit. We offer our travelers the possibility of getting to know some very interesting social experiments going on in the country – for the traveler an opportunity to see something not ordinarily shown to tourists and for those they meet an encounter with people who can broaden their horizons and visions of the world.
1. Escola Cajueiro | Amazon – Escola Cajueiro is an experimental school in Alter do Chao village in the Amazon. Many of our travelers who visit the Amazon are touched by the intelligence and importance of such a modern educational project in such a small community. Visitors to our Tapajós Private cruises can see the school.
2. Morrinho Project | Rio de Janeiro – Morrinho is a 400m2 maquette of the favela inside one of the most interesting favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Rather than a voyeuristic favela tour, we take our guests to see this maquette, one of the sensations of the 2007 Venice Art Bienalle.
3. Projeto Bagagem – Projeto Bagagem is a Brazilian NGO aimed at improving the livelihoods of low-income Brazilian communities by developing local development alternatives based on community-based tourism. We can arrange for our guests to have a special experience in one of the communities supported by Projeto Bagagem.
The secret of a great trip starts with great planning. Throughout the entire planning process you will be speaking to a dedicated Travel Manager who will be in charge of all details of your trip. The more you tell us about your interests, the better we can help create an itinerary that suits your needs.
One of the greatest attractions of tailor made trips are that itineraries are flexible. When you are in Brazil, you will count with the assistance of our operations department, on call 24 hours a day , and always available to answer any doubts, make changes to the itinerary or simply suggest a good restaurant for dinner.
We have a philosophy that ‘almost anything is possible’ and love to plan trips for people who like to get off the beaten path and challenge our creativity!
After having planned hundreds of individually crafted trips, we have divided the trip planning process into the following steps:
1. STORYBOARD CREATION – after getting to know you and your travel objectives, we will propose an itinerary that we think best fits what you are looking for. We charge a small planning fee of U$ 350 for creating all our individually crafted itineraries. This allows us to concentrate on producing trips for guests who value the level of personal service and attention to detail we think make all the difference. This is normally charged by credit card once the storyboard of the trip has been approved.
2. TRIP DEFINITION AND INITIAL DEPOSIT –once we have agreed on a storyboard, we will budget your trip out and send you a detailed itinerary that explains everything that’s included. We then normally require a 50% deposit and includes the planning fee charged as above.
3. FINAL PLANNING AND PAYMENT – One month before the trip we will confirm to you final details of the trip and charge you for the remaining 50% of the trip
4. TRAVEL PLAN SUBMISSION – About two weeks before the trip, you will receive a complete briefing kit with a detailed day-by-day briefing including all telephone numbers you will require, interesting background information about the places you will visit, lists of suggested restaurants, shopping etc.
For full time positions, we only hire non-Brazilian citizens who have visas that allow for legal employment.
