I took this trip in February, since I had a some time off to go travel. A friend of mine had just moved to Santiago and wasn't starting work/classes for a while, so I thought I'd visit Chile while I was free. We had seen something online about Easter Island and she said, "I really want to go there one day, especially since it's Chile." It took me about 10 seconds to realize I had a bunch of BA miles and that the Avios devaluations were about to happen, so I said, "then let's go to Easter Island." Our luck was running high, since the random week we chose to go to Easter Island was the same week as the Rapanui's Tapati Festival. If you go to IPC, I definitely recommend the beginning to middle of February -- it's a lively time on the island. Since I wanted to avoid paying the Chile reciprocity fee, I decided to fly to IPC from LIM and meet my friend coming in from SCL. Not one to simply just connect in LIM, I took the opportunity to head over to Cuzco and see Machu Picchu by myself, before meeting up with my friend in Chile. The routing I had was LAX-JFK on Delta (no report on that; used a voucher and sat in the bulkhead seat in Economy Comfort, as I missed the upgrade by just 1 ), JFK-LIM-CUZ, CUZ-LIM, LIM-IPC, IPC-SCL, SCL-LIM-JFK on LAN, and JFK-LAX on AA. JFK-LIM-IPC-SCL was 40K BA Executive Club miles for business class in the good ol' days. I booked LIM-CUZ-LIM with Avios a few days after the changes for 9K + $13. I booked LIM-JFK(stop)-LAX with 30K AA miles, and booked SCL-LIM in business for 10K Avios + cash. The SCL-LIM-JFK flight was actually the same flight number, but it made sense to save my AA miles and redeem those from LIM. Here are the links: 1. Introduction 2. American Airlines Admirals Club at JFK 3. LAN Business, JFK-LIM 4. LAN Economy, LIM-CUZ-LIM 5. Machu Picchu 6. Radisson Decapolis Lima 7. SUMAQ Lounge at LIM 8. LAN Business, LIM-IPC 9. Easter Island 10. LAN Business, IPC-SCL 11. Santiago 12. Neruda Lounge at SCL 13. LAN Business, SCL-LIM 14. LAN Business, LIM-JFK 15. Yotel NYC 16. American Transcontinental Business, JFK-LAX
Glad those were useful posts for you! It's almost a year since the Avios devaluation so there are fewer and fewer of these South America stopover trips
