I've been to Argentina many times including a trip late May last year. I've always taken my own guns until last year. Over the years things have gotten harder to take your own guns, both from the Argentina side of things & from the airline part of the travel.
Here's my take based on my experiences last year:
On the Argentina side of things: When you bring your own guns the outfitter now has to have a personal representative sign the RENAR paperwork for your guns at the airport, both for when you enter the country and when you depart. This makes things get pretty sticky if you want to spend time at another location than the outfitter operates from or if the lodge is in a remote location which makes it harder for them to have their representative present for these processes. The Lodge I've used over the years is several miles from Cordoba and just flat-out told us last year to rent a gun & not to bring our own because of the current regulations.
On the airline side of things: Be sure to book your flights by calling the reservation phone line, "Do Not Do Make Them On-Line" the reason for this is you need to make sure that all of your flight connections are on one airline travel/code number. In all likely hood you will probably need to make several connections & layovers including possibly in Santiago Chile or Lima Peru. If you don't have your travel on one code for the entire series of flights the airlines won't transfer your checked bags or guns to your next flight and you'll probably have to pick-up your checked items at each layover and re-check them for the next leg of your flight.
I ran into this on my trip last year. I flew from Denver to Dallas to Santiago to Cordoba & returned the same in reverse. Because I didn't have all these transfers on one airline booking code, I had to claim my bags at each layover and re-check them for the next flight. Santiago was a nightmare in that I had to go through customs to enter Chile, then claim my bags, then go through the processes for leaving the country and recheck my bags to Cordoba. I was lucky that I had a fairly large layover time line, but even with that I just barely made my flight to Cordoba. Thankfully I didn't have my guns with me on this trip, they would have made the airline transfers a hellish mess.
The best advice I can give you is to ask many questions of your outfitter about bringing personal guns & follow their instructions to a tee. Be sure to ask the airlines about the processes, policies & transfers, keeping in mind that when you change to a different airline their policies will be different and the airline your booking through probably wont be able to tell you the polices for the other carriers.
Traveling to Argentina with guns is very stressful on the best of days, my recommendation is to rent a gun if your outfitter supplies a type of gun you could be happy with. I don't like semi-auto's, but I can be happy shooting an O/U. We all love shooting our own guns, but based on my experiences from seven Argentina trips & my travel debacle of last year, I'll never take my own guns again. It's so much less stressful & easier to travel without them. Another item to consider is, why put all that wear on your gun from shooting thousands of rounds through it, put all that wear on a rental gun & walk away.
Argentina dove shoot's are a special experience, I've loved everyone of mine and hopefully I'll be able to do another one some day.
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