$0 Trip to Latin America: Booking the Flights

A little bit ago I introduced our series on doing completely Free Trips with all travel expenses paid. This is our “first trip” since having the concept of doing trips with the goal of being completely free.

1. $0 Trip to Latin America: Introduction

The trip consists of 24 nights in Central and South America. Particularly Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala. This was great timing because we had seen 3 of these countries but were thinking of doing a little more of Latin America and sharpening what little spanish speaking skills we have. The flights were the key part, but it was a part decided after seeing the IHG PointBreaks list. The InterContinental in Panama City, Cali, San Jose, and Guatemala City were 5,000 points a night. Seeing new places, hitting South America, staying at IC hotels for 5,000 points and testing my “Latin Hopper with United Miles” concept… it was a win, win, win. The Latin Hopper concept is noticing a great price on the United award chart, where you could start in one Latin American city and stopover in two cities on the way to a forth city.

Open-Jawing the Latin Hopper

The reason this ticket works, is because it’s “roundtrip” in that it changes regions. Because of this United allows 1 stopover and 2 open-jaws. Open-jaw means that we can return to a different airport than the one we started from. Changing Regions

• Start: Panama City
• Destination: Cali, Colombia
• Stopover: San Jose, Costa Rica
• End (open-jaw): Guatemala City

We started in Panama (Central America) and our “destination” was in Cali (Northern South America). We are pricing out from Central America to Northern South America (our destination), 10,000 miles. Then we also price from destination to end. Ignore the fact that there’s a stopover in Costa Rica, it’s on the way to our end point. We are now pricing Cali, Colombia (Northern South America) back to Guatemala City (Central America) for another 10,000. Put it together and you’ve got 20,000 United miles.

Latin Hopper Option

Think of it like this. We have zones and regions. Zones will be my grouping and regions will be the official grouping of United. United uses these “regions” to determine prices. Like if you go from the “North America region” to the “Central America region” it would be 17,500 miles. But I’ll group the regions into zones to make a point. Zone 1: Mexico region, Central America region, Caribbean region Zone 2: Northern South America region Zone 3: Southern South America Region Here’s the key with the Latin Hopper: When you go from one zone to another right below/above it, or within a zone, it is 10,000 miles. In other words, if you go from Zone 1 to Zone 2, it’s 10,000 miles. If you go from a region in Zone 1 to another region in Zone 1, it’s 10,000 miles. If you go to/from Zone 2 to Zone 3, it’s 10,000 miles. So don’t skip a zone. You could do zone 2 to zone 2 for 10,000 miles but there are two key elements to allowing a stopover. 1) it has to be a roundtrip, and 2) it has to change regions each direction of the roundtrip. A roundtrip within Northern South America will not qualify for a stopover because it doesn’t change regions. The cool thing with Zone 1 is that you have a ton of regions to go to/from for 10,000 miles. All this assumes you’re starting in Latin America. While it may have been cheaper to position with Avios (10,000 Avios from GUA – DFW) or with Southwest points, it just didn’t work out that way. We got in on the Lufthansa 50,000 miles offer, after spending $5,000, and therefore had 55,000 Lufthansa miles. Well, we had used 12,500 miles for someone else and had 42,500 miles left for ourself. For our flight down to Latin America we used 17,000 miles each for Albequrque to Panama City. The fees were $12.83 each and therefore cost 2,600 Arrival points for both tickets. What was cool is that we got a very long layover in Houston to spend time with my family. From 11am Saturday to 9am Sunday. We spent 6 nights in Panama City and then our last week is in Guatemala City. So we fly home using 17,500 AA miles. To be clear, we could have used other miles to book the exact same trip. USA – Panama City – Cali, Colombia – San Jose, Costa Rica – Guatemala City – USA   The same route with other miles (per person) would be:

• 43,000 ANA miles
• 35,000 Lufthansa miles if we cut out Cali
• 40,000 JAL miles

But we didn’t have these options at the moment. You’ve got to use what you have and you’ve got to see all the things you want to see. Given that this is the trip we wanted to do, how could we make it happen? The answer is to position with miles: 17,000 Lufthansa miles and 17,500 AA miles each, and then do a United Latin Hopper for 20,000 United miles each. Per person, it was 54,500 miles:

• 17,000 Lufthansa miles
• 20,000 United miles
• 17,500 AA miles

Basically, I paid 20,000 more miles to add in a Latin Hopper instead of doing a traditional roundtrip, or a single stopover.

Avoiding Close-In Fees

Since the trip was booked relatively last minute I had to worry about close-in fees. This is a fee that some airlines have for booking within 21 days of travel. It’s generally $75. I booked in this order:

1. Hotels as soon as the PointBreaks list went live – 1 month out
2. Booked United flight to connect all the hotels – 1 month out
3. Lufthansa flight to Panama City – 5 days out
4. Booked flight from Guatemala to the US – Booked while in Panama (last week)

United does have a close-in fee, so we booked 1 month in advance Lufthansa does not have a close-in fee, so booking 5 days out was no issue.   We were going to use Avios to book a flight back as they do not have a close-in fee. Avios to Dallas would be only 10,000 miles/Avios but we had to go to Vegas instead and might as well use AA miles. AA also has a close-in fee but our status waives it. So we’re lucky to have status and AA miles for this example.

Conclusion

There are a number of ways we could have booked this flight, although it was more fitting for Star Alliance as Panama, Colombia, and Costa Rica (kind of) all contain Star Alliance hubs, or at least focus cities. This allowed us to hit all of what we needed. If we were doing more of South America, OneWorld could be better, however United would have been even more of a winner as it’s region based and not distance based. Miles and points are simply about earning and burning. This post is about burning and I have to that say over all, Latin America is an easy place to book flights. Many options, many stopover options, and with no fuel surcharges. Sometimes availability can be tough depending on the route, but this was really easy.