A few months ago, I shared why I’m still planning travel and mentioned the cheap flights to Peru that I had scored for December via the Google Flights’ Explore tool. We booked a three-week trip, since we had so much PTO after our other trips this year were cancelled, and we were very excited to make our way back to South America after our trip to Fortaleza, Brazil last year.
After doing a lot of research, we ultimately built out a plan that would allow us to see five cities in four different countries. This plan had us…
- Flying from Tampa, Florida to Lima, Peru
- Flying from Lima, Peru to Santiago, Chile
- Flying from Santiago, Chile to Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Sailing from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Montevideo, Uruguay
- Flying from Lima, Peru to Cusco, Peru
I followed these locations as hashtags on Instagram, which I would recommend doing for any trip you’re planning, as well as reached out to friends (Thanks Hannah!) for their experiences as we developed a tentative itinerary. We were feeling confident in our plan, which included a hike to Machu Picchu and a visit to Huacachina‘s desert oasis. However, we had decided that until we got closer to the travel dates, we weren’t willing to commit to purchases beyond our flights to Lima from Tampa.
Now that it’s October and our trip has been officially cancelled, I’m glad we didn’t continue locking in reservations. For one, COVID is obviously still a major issue when it comes to traveling across both North and South America; for another, I’ll be in my third trimester – as much as I look forward to someday hiking through the Sun Gate to Machu Picchu, I’d prefer not to do it while pregnant.
Without anything else booked, that just left us with flights to Lima in December. Many airlines are being much more flexible about rescheduling travel and offering credits for future flights, but since we don’t know when we’ll next be able to travel, we wanted to hold out for a refund. Fortunately, we know how to get money back for cancelled trips. We opted to “play the long game” with this set of flights; we’ve known for a little while now that we were going to postpone this trip, but I just got an email from our airline last week that said they had changed our flight home from Peru by about seven hours.
That was enough to jump on. I called the airline to cancel the reservation and confirmed we were eligible for a refund due to the significance of the change; after all these flights “no longer worked” with our plans. (Besides, they now wanted us to fly back at 1AM on New Years’ Day, which would mean ringing in 2021 at the airport. Um, no, thank you.) The airline did confirm we were eligible – their policy is that a flight is eligible for a refund if the change is more than four hours, though I’ve seen this vary by airline – so we’re just waiting for the money to come back to our credit card. After spending the holidays abroad the last two years, it looks like we’ll be spending them at home this year…
Now, if you’re looking to travel over the holidays, there are definitely cheap flights to be had! Bonus: you make the most of any already given days off from work. But for us, we’ll just have to start planning our next trip – maybe for December 2021. 🙂