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Part of my 10 Days in Peru with Kids series.

When people find out we flew and housed six of us in Peru for 10 nights for $600, the first question is always the same: how? This post is the answer. Below you’ll find every single hotel and flight from our trip, from the Lima layover to the flight home, with the exact points, cash, and booking method we used for each one. No vague ‘we used points’ hand-waving, just the real numbers so you can see exactly how the math worked and start building a trip like this of your own.

Hotels

Lima — IHG Lima Airport, 1 night, 2 rooms Booked using a $250 IHG hotel credit. That credit comes from the Chase Sapphire Reserve’s annual hotel credit, which is one reason I still think the card’s annual fee is worth it, even before you count the points. If you want the full picture of how IHG points and dynamic pricing work, I wrote a complete IHG guide that walks through it step by step. The cash price for these two rooms would have been $340 for one night.

Sacred Valley — Las Qolqas EcoLodge, 4 nights 44,000 Hyatt points per night. Hyatt is consistently the best value redemption in our toolkit, and this stay is a good example of why. If you’re not sure which cards actually earn Hyatt points or how to move points into a Hyatt account, my Hyatt guide covers the best cards to use and how to book. This stay would have cost us $2,376. We booked a group tent with two king bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a bunk room upstairs.

Cusco — Wyndham Costa del Sol, 4 nights, 2 rooms, 120,000 Wyndham points total, an absolute steal for this property. Wyndham’s flat pricing is what made this work for a family of six, since the points price per room doesn’t change based on how many people are staying in it. My Wyndham guide breaks down how that flat pricing works and which properties are worth targeting. This stay would have been $1,785 for two rooms for 4 nights.

Flights

MCI → LaGuardia, Southwest: Our domestic connector to get to the international gateway. If you fly Southwest regularly for legs like this one, working toward a Southwest Companion Pass is one of the highest-value things you can do, since it effectively cuts every domestic connector like this in half. The cash price for six flights was $1,776. We booked flights to NYC for 15,500 and used Companion Passes so my son and daughter flew for free. 31,000 points for the four of use to fly.

JFK → Lima, Virgin Atlantic Cash cost for these flights was $3,267. We paid 25,000 points and $20.60 per person. I booked our flights on Virgin, but we flew on LATAM. If you are new to airline alliances and how to use them to potentially save thousands of points on your next flight, read my blog post here.

Lima → Cusco, JetSmart: a short in-country hop. Flights were $224 round-trip, including a carry-on bag. We booked our flights through the Capital One Travel Portal. It took 22,400 points per person to cover the round-trip flights to Cusco.

Cusco → Lima → Miami, home. This is also where things went sideways with Qatar. I’m covering that whole story separately because it deserves its own post: [When Award Travel Goes Wrong →coming soon]. I had originally booked flights on LATAM through Qatar, only to find out 20 minutes before our flight that we would not be issued boarding passes. The agents could see our reservation and even the seats I picked for the flight, but there was a mistake on Qatar’s end: a reservation number hadn’t been entered. More on that in my When Award Travel Goes Wrong post. We ended up paying 25,000 United points and $70 per person to fly back from Lima to Houston. Then I booked flights for 17,000 points and $5.60 from Houston to Kansas City. Again, using our companion passes, my son and daughter flew for free.

Understanding How the Pieces Fit Together

A trip like this involves several loyalty programs and alliances in a single itinerary. If you’ve ever wondered why an airline can sell you a seat on a completely different airline, my airline alliances explainer is the first post to read. And if you’re ever stuck without direct flights from your home airport, my guide to positioning for award flights covers exactly how to find a better hub.

Transportation

I like to have our ground transportation buttoned up before we even set foot off the plane. Transportation was one of the smoothest parts of the entire trip. The IHG Lima Airport Hotel offers a complimentary shuttle that is prompt, easy, and exactly what you want after a long overnight flight — I would highly recommend it and would stay there again just for that alone.

From the Cusco airport to Las Qolqas EcoLodge in the Sacred Valley, we hired a private van for $100, and Las Qolqas provided a complimentary shuttle from the lodge to Ollantaytambo for our Machu Picchu day, which was a genuinely appreciated perk. Their van runs from 6:00 to 6:30 pm and is available to guests as much as you like. The private van from Las Qolqas to the Wyndham Costa del Sol in Cusco ran $100.

On the US side, we paid $70 for transportation from Bush Intercontinental to Hobby Airport in Houston and $105 for an Uber from LaGuardia to JFK in New York. For every activity day in the Sacred Valley and Cusco, our tour operators handled transportation as part of the experience, and I will break all of that down in the activities post.

New to This?

If this all sounds like a foreign language right now, start with The Blueprint. It’s free, and it’s exactly how I’d teach you to build a trip like this one from scratch.

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Next in this series: Las Qolqas & the Sacred Valley