You’re on! I’ll be in town this summer. 🙂

Yes, the Palacio del Inka was only supposed to be three paid nights. The rest were ‘free’ on points. But we got sick. I wouldn’t have done those extra nights on purpose because there was not enough in return. And crazy expensive. A one off.

Though I know it is not intuitive because point hacks are a bit out there, but there is some sense to the few paid nights we plan.

This post
details how we averaged $48.90 CAD for our first 77 nights, mostly two rooms, by combining paid nights (to earn points during promotions) with point stays.

We’re renting a two bedroom condo in Nica near the beach. Very much looking forward to it.

I was, literally, about to ask you how you track all of that! ?
The next time you are here, longer than 1 day (!), you’ll have a meal on me. ?

Hi Colleen,
Fascinating update of your expenses! We have very different ways of traveling and saving money. You are considerably more knowledgeable about the use of hotel points – awesome! Though it appears from your Peruvian breakdown that you still spent quite a bit of money on accommodation. Granted – most of it was top-notch accommodation…some of the places you stayed in Cusco are among the very best Cusco has to offer!

As for Argentina, yeah. Argentina and Chile are renowned for being ridiculously expensive places to travel in South America. I’ve been curious about both, but until a free accommodation gig presents itself, I won’t be booking a ticket. 😉

I suspect that settling in somewhere for a month as you’re doing in Nicaragua will significantly lower your costs. (I rarely stay anywhere for less than a month these days).
First off, traveling slowly (ie: reducing the amount of transportation you’re taking) has a huge impact on budgets.
Secondly, assuming you’re renting a house/apartment as opposed to staying in a hotel, you’ll not only pay much less per night of accommodation, but you’ll also have a kitchen and ability to save a huge wad of cash on food in cooking (at least a few) meals at home.
Lastly, hopefully you’ll get a better feeling of connection to the country and community.
All in all, slow travel is very important to me for these reasons – the latter being the most important.

Enjoy Nicaragua! I haven’t been there, but I hear amazing things.

LOL, this could be true.

Though six of our seven nights at the Holiday Inn Panama Canal are on points. IHG Point Breaks to be exact. So our two rooms cost a total of 30,000 IHG points each.

We added in a paid night to help complete IHG’s 2018 1st Quarter Accelerate promotion to earn another 42,500 IHG points.

We’ve only been on the road since August so I don’t have an annual total. Yet. Our costs went up once we got to South America.

Argentina was particularly hard to stay within budget although most of our hotel nights were free (points). Oh, Iguazu Falls was partly to blame but so worth it. Groceries and transportation were expensive for the five of us. Inflation over the last few years has put Argentine prices beyond what I would pay for equivalent things in Canada.

We initially targeted $50,000 USD for the five of us, 4 1/2 adults. Add in our Canadian dollar…

So right now we’re over our daily average but we’re settling in Nicaragua for a month and that should help knock it down a bit.

We detail our spending and travel strategy on our blog

Peru was our last update

Hi Colleen,
The Panama Canal sounds like a pretty great view from bed! (Perhaps that’s why your travel expenses exceeded your estimate – ha ha)!
But I jest.
Actually I’m very curious what your cost to travel as a family of five has been. What did the year come in at?

I’m reading this post in bed watching ships transit the Panama Canal.

Our travel expenses are higher than I targeted and we don’t have a year wrap up yet, but we share our expenses on our blog. Family of five and the oldest turns 17 in ten days.

As always Nora, thanks for sharing,
Colleen

Hey Rob,
Amen to that!
PS – for expense tracking, I suggest using an app. Get into the habit of recording everything as you spend it. I personally love Trail Wallet, which is geared for travel, but as far as I’m concerned is equally useful at “home” as well. 🙂

I also see my bookkeeping is really non existent 🙂 but that’s a different story.

I’d like to wish you good luck in finding a spot to call your own!
When you wake up some morning and have that feeling that you’d like to go home, it’s good to have someplace go.