5 Important Tips for Affordable Travel to the Galapagos
So, we have been talking about getting away for the winter ever since we first started living at Disappointment Ranch full time. We love northern Wisconsin, but the winter does get long. When we first built our cabin up here, the intention was to spend only the summers, and spend the winters down in Madison. However, once the cabin was built, Jake refused to leave. I have never regretted it - however, sometimes I really miss city life. Or, not exactly city life, but the change of scenery and cool things to do even when it is freezing cold out. So, since we sold our house in southern Wisconsin, it has been our goal to spend part of the winter somewhere else, preferably (for me) warm. Enter Ecuador.
Ecuador is a compact country that packs quite a punch (mountains, volcanoes, jungle, coast and of course – the Galapagos). I will do another post on the many awesome things about Ecuador, but here I want to focus on how to save a ton of money on booking a trip there.
Earn Miles! There are innumerable posts about how to earn miles and ways to book trips to South America using miles, and people who are much more knowledgeable about how to do this. I will defer to them, especially about earning miles. Rules and such are always changing, and this is not exactly a travel blog; it’s more of a real lifestyle blog. I am not an expert in everything (or anything), nor am I going to pretend to be. I am going to focus on what I did and why. I had a hard time finding good information about getting to the Galapagos with miles (WHY? Isn’t the Galapagos #1 on everyone’s bucket list?!?). I have lots of AA (American Airlines) miles; here is their award chart so you can see how many miles you need to earn. I have been stockpiling them for years in the hopes of actually using them to go somewhere exotic!
Use those miles! Book directly to the Galapagos. There are two airports on the Galapagos. One is on Baltra Island (airport code: GPS, also known as Seymour Airport, also known as Baltra Airport - get used to it, everything in the Galapagos seems to have at least two names - it’s not at all confusing), from there you can easily access Santa Cruz island which is the most developed of the islands and the one that most of the cruises leave from - if that is your thing. The other airport is on San Cristobel Island (airport code SCY). American Airlines flies to mainland Ecuador, but not directly to the Galapagos. However, their partner airline LATAM (formerly LAN and TAM) does. How do you find award availability all the way there though? Well, that gets a little more complicated. You need to be flexible for this to work, the odds that you will have to change your dates or fiddle with your destination a bit are high. First, search on aa.com for award availability to either Guayaquil (GYE) or Quito (UIO) – these are the two main airports on mainland Ecuador. You have to stop at one of these airports in order to go through the screening process to get to the Galapagos. So, in other words: your reservation needs to be booked all the way through to one of the airports in the Galapagos, but you need to search for award availability to the mainland and to the islands separately. I wanted to fly into GYE since a lot of flights that leave from Quito have a layover there anyway. That didn’t work out; we ended up flying into Quito, but no biggie. I researched both so that I had options when I called in.
Call in when you are prepared! This call is going to take a while, so you don’t want to have to do it twice. I hate spending time on the phone and work hard to minimize it. I had signed up with LATAM’s award program so that I could look at award availability to the Galapagos from both Guayaquil and Quito. This didn’t end up being as helpful as I thought it would be, since when I called AA they showed different availability for LATAM than I saw, but I think that just the fact that I was confident that there was award availability for that time period made them look harder than they might have otherwise. Also, I knew what the award availability was for AA for both Guayaquil and Quito, so I was able to change dates and destinations to be able to fit with the LATAM award availability. This leads into...
Be PERSISTENT and FLEXIBLE! At first, I had an agent that was not so awesome. She truly was trying to help me, but she just didn’t have the know-how to do anything like that. It sounded like she was more used to booking domestic flights. She was able to transfer me to someone who had more experience with international travel through. That guy was awesome. Seriously, if you don’t get someone who can help you the first time, and isn’t willing to transfer you, hang up and try again. I asked him if he had a direct line in case I wanted to change anything, but unfortunately, not. Oh well. Just be persistent and willing to change dates, times or destinations. For instance, I knew I was aiming for the middle of January to somewhere in mainland Ecuador - either Quito or Guayaquil. I also knew that I wanted to fly into somewhere in the Galapagos - either San Cristobal or Baltra. This gave me a lot to work with. I had plotted out several scenarios, and I had the aa website pulled up so I could keep looking at different dates. We ended up flying into Baltra and out of San Cristobal which was perfect. I am probably making this sound harder than it is, but just know that it can be done if you are persistent and flexible enough. 🙂
Keep in mind that the Galapagos are part of Ecuador. This means that booking a flight between the Galapagos and the mainland of Ecuador only costs 5,000 AA miles! Whoo-hoo! And this only applies to the way back since you should book all the way through to the Galapagos on the way there. I booked all of these flights with the super-duper agent mentioned previously. All of this means that I was able to go: to the Galapagos for two weeks, back to mainland Ecuador to spend two weeks there, and then back home for 55,000 miles per person. This includes coming home first class - which accounts for over half of the miles (sometimes it’s nice to splurge).
Bonus - Celebrate your success! You’re going to the Galapagos and Ecuador. I am jealous. 🙂
