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| Our family standing in front of Machu Picchu - Amazing |
And the best part, we travelled for almost FREE! I'll show you what we did and how much it cost and how you can do the same trip for the same price. Travel doesn't have to be expensive and I'll show you how.
Since we saw so much, I am going to break this up into 6 parts.
Part 1 Peru in general and our itinerary
Part 2 Cuzco
Part 3 Sacred Valley
Part 4 Machu Picchu
Part 3 Sacred Valley
Part 4 Machu Picchu
Part 5 Paracas/Ballestas Island/Huacachina
Part 6 Iquitos and the Amazon
Here we go, part 1.
The Incas believe there are 3 pillars to life; love, work and knowledge. They were not lazy people as evidenced by Machu Picchu and the other ruins that have been left behind. Travel too is based on your love of culture, history and experience. Work hard to gather points and miles and the knowledge to use them smart to create a cost effective trip.
So we started planning this Peru trip 2 years ago, how time flies. We wanted to go to South America to add another continent and to practice speaking Spanish. When we first started planning the trip, my thought was to fly into or out of Lima and then cross the continent and fly in or out of Argentina. Some of you may know about my personal goal to visit 50 countries by my 50th year so I needed to travel in several countries on this trip to keep marching forward.
However, one of the points to keep in mind when flying with miles is to be flexible. Sometimes it is more cost effective to change your dates or destinations to maximize points.
When I started to research travel in South America for a family of 5, I quickly figured out that unlike Europe where you can take a train or low cost carrier from one city to another, it is very expensive and you have to fly. So every leg of our trip would cost an estimated $600 for us to fly for example from Cuzco to Lima. Ouch!
At the same time, British Airways was running a promotion on their credit card for 100,000 Avios bonus for a minimum spend. Since British Airways is a partner with Lan Airlines and the legs are all short haul, they only cost 4500 Avios points each. For 5 tickets, that's 22,500. 100,000 Avios then gets us a minimum of 4 legs. We had collected almost 200,000 American miles by signing up for the Citi American and the US Airways cards before the two airlines merged. Plus we had Starwood points which transfer to American 1:1 with a 5000 bonus for every 20,000 if we needed more.
So the next step is to spend time on American Airlines website to identify award seats which were all listed for regular economy points of 22,500 each way. But I check at least once a day and BAM, I looked and a return flight from Lima on August 10th was listed for 12,500. I jumped on it and called the desk and booked it for 5 people.
Now I researched flights to Peru or Brazil or Argentina, but due to the Olympics, all the seats to Brazil and Argentina were sold out on economy points. So we decided that we would just focus this trip on Peru.
So I started looking at flying into Cuzco to maximize our points. American charges the same number of points to fly into Lima or Cuzco so by flying straight into Cuzco, we save buying a whole leg of the trip.
I finally find a flight on Wednesday July 26th for 5 people straight into Cuzco for 22,500 each. The American Airlines operator can't believe it and we book it.
Now we have secured 5 round trip tickets from LA-Cuzco and Lima-LA for 175,000. BAM!
Now it's time to secure domestic legs with our British Avios points. Obviously, we need Cuzco-Lima and then we decided to spend some time in the Amazon near Iquitos so we need to fly there too. American Airlines was able to book the flights on LAN using the Avios and they didn't charge a fee since you can't book this online. The flights were wide open so we could pick and choose. Easy and done for 67,500. Nice.
Now our itinerary looks like this:
July 26 LA-Cuzco
July 27-28 acclimate in Cuzco
July 29-30 Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu
July 31 Cuzco-Lima
August 1-2 Paracas/Huacachina
August 3-4 Lima
August 4 Lima to Iquitos
August 5-9 Amazon
August 9 Iquitos to Lima
August 10 Lima to LA
Next stop, hotels. We have Starwood, Marriott and Hilton points. Hyatt offers 2 nights free with their credit card, but we used those for Hawaii a few years ago. Now for a family of 5 options in South America are limited unless you book 2 rooms. Awardmapper is good search tool so you can see what's available. So we opted for the Hilton Doubletree Paracas which is all suites and can fit 5 although you can only book the room officially for 4 people. And the Wyndham Lima Airport which almost everyone stays at because it is connected to the airport and flights around Peru all start and end in Lima so you will most likely end up with some strange layover there.
The Wyndham credit card bonus was 45,000 points with a $1000 minimum spend. All rooms worldwide cost 15,000 points per night so we could get 2 nights FREE.
For the rest of our hotels, we used Airbnb in Lima (I had a credit for referring a friend to host), Booking.com (through a cash back site Ebates.com) and Travelocity.com (through a cashback site Ebates.com). Both websites offered great rates even though we had to book 2 rooms. But Casona Les Pleides in Cuzco offered breakfast and allowed us to store our luggage while we travelled to Machu Picchu. Nativa Apartments in Iquitos did not offer breakfast but had air conditioning which was key. And Aquas Calientes has very few good deals since you are basically trapped. But the Killa Inn did store some luggage for us and offer us breakfast.
In the next post, we will start our adventure and I'll share tips and videos about things you don't want to miss and how you can save even more money on your trip than we did.
Here we go, part 1.
The Incas believe there are 3 pillars to life; love, work and knowledge. They were not lazy people as evidenced by Machu Picchu and the other ruins that have been left behind. Travel too is based on your love of culture, history and experience. Work hard to gather points and miles and the knowledge to use them smart to create a cost effective trip.
So we started planning this Peru trip 2 years ago, how time flies. We wanted to go to South America to add another continent and to practice speaking Spanish. When we first started planning the trip, my thought was to fly into or out of Lima and then cross the continent and fly in or out of Argentina. Some of you may know about my personal goal to visit 50 countries by my 50th year so I needed to travel in several countries on this trip to keep marching forward.
However, one of the points to keep in mind when flying with miles is to be flexible. Sometimes it is more cost effective to change your dates or destinations to maximize points.
When I started to research travel in South America for a family of 5, I quickly figured out that unlike Europe where you can take a train or low cost carrier from one city to another, it is very expensive and you have to fly. So every leg of our trip would cost an estimated $600 for us to fly for example from Cuzco to Lima. Ouch!
At the same time, British Airways was running a promotion on their credit card for 100,000 Avios bonus for a minimum spend. Since British Airways is a partner with Lan Airlines and the legs are all short haul, they only cost 4500 Avios points each. For 5 tickets, that's 22,500. 100,000 Avios then gets us a minimum of 4 legs. We had collected almost 200,000 American miles by signing up for the Citi American and the US Airways cards before the two airlines merged. Plus we had Starwood points which transfer to American 1:1 with a 5000 bonus for every 20,000 if we needed more.
So the next step is to spend time on American Airlines website to identify award seats which were all listed for regular economy points of 22,500 each way. But I check at least once a day and BAM, I looked and a return flight from Lima on August 10th was listed for 12,500. I jumped on it and called the desk and booked it for 5 people.
Now I researched flights to Peru or Brazil or Argentina, but due to the Olympics, all the seats to Brazil and Argentina were sold out on economy points. So we decided that we would just focus this trip on Peru.
So I started looking at flying into Cuzco to maximize our points. American charges the same number of points to fly into Lima or Cuzco so by flying straight into Cuzco, we save buying a whole leg of the trip.
I finally find a flight on Wednesday July 26th for 5 people straight into Cuzco for 22,500 each. The American Airlines operator can't believe it and we book it.
Now we have secured 5 round trip tickets from LA-Cuzco and Lima-LA for 175,000. BAM!
Now it's time to secure domestic legs with our British Avios points. Obviously, we need Cuzco-Lima and then we decided to spend some time in the Amazon near Iquitos so we need to fly there too. American Airlines was able to book the flights on LAN using the Avios and they didn't charge a fee since you can't book this online. The flights were wide open so we could pick and choose. Easy and done for 67,500. Nice.
Now our itinerary looks like this:
July 26 LA-Cuzco
July 27-28 acclimate in Cuzco
July 29-30 Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu
July 31 Cuzco-Lima
August 1-2 Paracas/Huacachina
August 3-4 Lima
August 4 Lima to Iquitos
August 5-9 Amazon
August 9 Iquitos to Lima
August 10 Lima to LA
Next stop, hotels. We have Starwood, Marriott and Hilton points. Hyatt offers 2 nights free with their credit card, but we used those for Hawaii a few years ago. Now for a family of 5 options in South America are limited unless you book 2 rooms. Awardmapper is good search tool so you can see what's available. So we opted for the Hilton Doubletree Paracas which is all suites and can fit 5 although you can only book the room officially for 4 people. And the Wyndham Lima Airport which almost everyone stays at because it is connected to the airport and flights around Peru all start and end in Lima so you will most likely end up with some strange layover there.
The Wyndham credit card bonus was 45,000 points with a $1000 minimum spend. All rooms worldwide cost 15,000 points per night so we could get 2 nights FREE.
For the rest of our hotels, we used Airbnb in Lima (I had a credit for referring a friend to host), Booking.com (through a cash back site Ebates.com) and Travelocity.com (through a cashback site Ebates.com). Both websites offered great rates even though we had to book 2 rooms. But Casona Les Pleides in Cuzco offered breakfast and allowed us to store our luggage while we travelled to Machu Picchu. Nativa Apartments in Iquitos did not offer breakfast but had air conditioning which was key. And Aquas Calientes has very few good deals since you are basically trapped. But the Killa Inn did store some luggage for us and offer us breakfast.
In the next post, we will start our adventure and I'll share tips and videos about things you don't want to miss and how you can save even more money on your trip than we did.
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