We just left Bhutan after spending 5 nights in Paro at the Spirit Sanctuary (on Hyatt points). I will say that there is a lot of misinformation out there about tourism in Bhutan. Spend 10 minutes on the Tripadvisor forums and you're going to get a ton of tour agencies posting misinformation in order to confuse you so you give up and pay a premium to use a booking service. Beyond that, the whole process for applying for the Visa is overly complicated and the website has a number of bugs.. which I think is also to push you to using Bhutan based agencies to support more employment in the country. I found this rather odd seeing as they needed to drop the daily fee by 50% to boost their tourism. Feel free to PM me if you need any tips or contacts for drivers/guides.

• You do not need a guide to visit the tigers nest, travel freely in Paro or Thimphu, or travel between the two cities. Is a guide worth the $70-80 premium? They are if you want one someone who will haul up your water, snacks, and lug those out of shape up the mountain. They will also be the only way for you to get into the actual monastery. Personally, I liked visiting the monastery even though I had seen multiple in the days prior. It would feel a little weird to hike up 90 minutes to take photos and turn around. If you get there early enough and have the place to yourself it is quite magical. Kind of the feeling I got visiting Machu Picchu for the first time.
• It's not that difficult to get the Visa, but one bank charges a 4.5% fee for a credit card and the other charges 5%. You are better off going with that as doing a wire transfer incurs a SWIFT fee on top of the normal international wire fees. I sent the money using WISE and it was not much of a savings as the SWIFT fee was $20 on top of the other fees.
• When you arrive you will likely need to get a SIM card as providers from the USA (E.g., T-Mobile) do not provide services in Bhutan. They are one of the few excluded countries.
• You will also want to pull out some money at the ATM and consider bringing a card from a second bank as it is a gamble if your card will actually work. The airport has an ATM with three different banks in Bhutan and I could only get one to work with Schwab, even then it would only let me pull out money once. The Spirit Sanctuary will do a cash advance at no cost, but if you have to cover the amount at checkout and if you charge it to a credit card they charge a 3% fee.
• They have a taxi stand at the airport. Hotels overcharge a great deal on airport transfers and from what I've been told you have to pay another 20% on top of that in taxes.
• Be prepared to pay more once they find out you are from the USA or see you are white. Quotes were completely different when they saw my Whatsapp profile photo.
• Tours booked through the hotel may likely be outsourced to a tour agency that hires a freelance tour guide. Feel free to ping me as we met a few guides and finally found a good one. Most have very thick accents.
• If possible, try to book directly with the guide. Guides pay anywhere from a 25-35% commission to the agency that gave them the gig. You will likely get a significant savings and on top of that will not have to pay an additional 20% in taxes.
• Be prepared to get a PhD in Buddhism. Our first guide refused to listen to our preferences and things felt extremely repetitive. We told him we did not want to do museums and wanted to limit the number of tourist sites as we were interested in meeting local people and learning about their way of life. Fortunately we got another guide who listened and it completely changed the experience.
• Guides are just like any normal guide elsewhere in the world. They will push you towards restaurants and shops that give them kickbacks.
• You can book drivers and taxis, but when we did that we quickly noticed they spoke very little English.