Trip Introduction: Lima, Machu Picchu, Peru and Middle Chile via Air Canada Executive First

Trip Planning:

This trip started with Ms World Traveller 73’s desire to visit Macchu Pichu in Peru. Indeed it was somewhere that I had always been interested in seeing, but wasn’t too high on the list. For me, it was sort of like Hawaii or Thailand, until I actually traveled to both of those places and ended up loving them both. We started making plans and with some convincing, I was able to talk her into a second leg of the trip down to Santiago Chile for some skiing and wine tours.

At the time we were travelling, we were both Air Canada Elite members. This provided us with a number of electronic upgrades (“E-upgrades”) that could clear from economy class fares. This was a terrific deal as you could essentially get business class for the price of economy by booking on a less business heavy route. We booked the trip on the Air Canada website into a Tango Plus Fare. The fare came to only $1,110 CAD ($812 USD). I chose the flights so that we would have 2 and a half hours in Toronto to change planes and experience my favorite Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge (MLL) the YYZ International Lounge. We used e-upgrades to upgrade to executive class, which were cleared and confirmed at the 4 day window in each direction. It was a super deal that is unfortunately, no longer offered today at this status level.

While we were in Peru, we decided to take the easy route and ended up with a packaged tour. There were some logistics needed for getting to Machu Picchu and we took the easy route by going with a Monograms Tour. This was a great choice and we were really happy with the options that they provided and the whole experience.

With this particular tour, we were on our own for our airfare inside the country. I ended up booking the internal flights within LAN Peru on the regular LAN Peru website. Although we could have used BA Avios points for the flight, we ended up paying cash at about $300 CAD per person. We also booked a separate ticket from Lima – Santiago on LAN Chile.

The trip ended up looking like this:

Overall, we really enjoyed this trip. Peru is a wonderful country to visit and I would highly recommend it. Being able to ski in August has always been a dream of mine and I was happy to have made that one come true.