In March 2019, I'll be leading a student trip to Colombia and Panama, and would like to visit both Bogota and Medellin before continuing on to Panama. The question is: which to visit first, before continuing to Panama.
The main benefits, I see, to visiting Medellin first is that it's lower altitude and better for "easing" into the trip from the states than starting at 9000'+. In addition, if we visit Bogota second, the group will have more things to do with a free day at that point in the trip.
The main benefit to visiting Bogota first would be that there are more, easier, possibly marginally cheaper connections from the US. (Most, if not all, of us will be coming from SEA). Tickets between MDE/BOG and PTY appear to be comparable in price and pretty frequent, perhaps more so BOG-PTY. (The students are on their own to get to Colombia by the start of the trip; we're not doing a group flight)
It's really hard for me to judge the importance of the altitude situation, as I'm one of the lucky ones who doesn't have problems, but I have friends who get nauseated, have headaches, etc. I'm guessing it's not as bad as flying into La Paz (which I've done), but I want as many people as possible to have as pleasant a time as possible
So what would you do? SEA-MDE-BOG-PTY or SEA-BOG-MDE-PTY?