2024 South America and Antarctica Trip: Summary and Expenses

At the beginning of 2024 we embarked on our 7th multiple month international trip since 2018. We’ve learned a lot about how to plan these trips over the years, and each successive trip has been a little more optimized. Although the costs of our trips have increased gradually over the years, our enjoyment of the trips have increased exponentially with the modifications. Early on, it was all about traveling on a budget and proving to ourselves that taking multiple months off of work to travel around the world was possible while still working toward our goal of financial independence. Over the last few years, as we’ve gotten older, it’s been much more about going to bucket list destinations and maximizing our comfort and enjoyment on the trip, even if it means spending a little more, within reason of course. This most recent trip was no exception!

If you haven’t read about our prior trips and the associated expenses, you may be interested in those as well:

The top place on our travel bucket list following our last trip (our Europe honeymoon in summer 2023, which we said might be our “last long international trip”) — was Patagonia. The best time to visit Patagonia is in their summer, which is our winter. So we began considering taking this trip in the winter of 2023-2024. Just visiting Patagonia for a couple weeks was always an option, but not really our style. Traveling so far for just a couple of weeks when we have a flexible lifestyle and the financial ability to stay longer just doesn’t make sense to us.

So when we began planning this trip for the winter, our primary limitations were the holidays, and a conference in February, so we had about 6 weeks to work with in between. Planning a 6 week trip with some extra time built in gave us the perfect opportunity to take a cruise to Antarctica, our final continent! We’d never gone on a long cruise before, but it seemed like by far the easiest and most cost effective way to see Antarctica, so we were willing to give it a shot. We still had some time to spare after the cruise and Patagonia, with which we decided to stop in Ecuador on our way back home.

Here’s an overview of what our trip itinerary looked like:

Trip Overview

  • Buenos Aires, Argentina- 3 days
  • Antarctic Cruise- 16 days
    • Montevideo, Uruguay
    • Stanley, Falkland Islands
    • Cruising around the Antarctic Peninsula
    • Cruising around Cape Horn
    • Ushuaia, Argentina
    • Punta Arenas, Chile
    • Santiago, Chile
  • Santiago, Chile- 2 days
  • Puerto Natales, Chile- 1 day
  • Torres Del Paine National Park, Chile- 4 days
  • Puerto Natales, Chile- 1 day
  • El Calafate, Argentina- 3 days
  • El Chalten, Argentina- 4 days
  • Buenos Aires, Argentina- 1 day
  • Cloud Forest of Ecuador- 4 days
  • Quito, Ecuador- 2 days

The logistics for planning this trip were even harder than normal. Patagonia is pretty remote, which makes getting to and from as well as traveling around to the different areas difficult. It’s also expensive, and finding places to stay is competitive in the summer season (winter in the Northern Hemisphere) when the weather is best there. This meant more quick, 1-2 night stays then we’d usually like to have on an international trip, but considering this was already a shorter trip than we normally take, it had to be done and wasn’t a huge deal. With only 6 weeks, we knew that we wouldn’t get the same travel fatigue that normally sets in for us between 2-3 months, so being more action packed with little down time was doable. With the trip being shorter, we even had the entire thing booked before leaving, which is a first for us as well. After so many mishaps with flights on our Europe trip last summer, we were nervous to have everything booked, but we tried our best to book things with flexible cancellation policies. Fortunately, the whole trip went surprisingly smooth with no major changes or mishaps.

Another thing that made this trip unique and exciting is that we spent the majority of it with another couple who are friends of ours (and fellow Travel PTs). We weren’t sure how it would be to travel with other people, especially for 5 weeks (the 6th week was on our own), but it was a lot of fun and we’d definitely do it again in the future.

Below are my expenses for this trip. Stay tuned for Whitney’s post for more details about all the fun things we did on the trip, but for now I’ll focus on my expenses incurred on the trip. Keep in mind that all of the expenses that I’ll talk about below are my expenses only, since Whitney and I have quite different spending habits at times. We split all shared expenses evenly, so I calculate the numbers below with my half of the shared expenses and then my individual expenses (or for some things on this trip, it was my quarter of the expenses, such as shared accommodations when there were four of us).

Expense Breakdown

As I mentioned above, the purpose of this trip was to see some amazing places and have a great time doing it, not necessarily to travel as budget friendly as possible. While we certainly did our best to minimize expenses when possible, it really wasn’t a major focus this time. For the cruise costs on this trip, I decided to divide the total cost between the various categories since it really applied to all of them. I applied half of the total cost to lodging and split the other half evenly between food/drink, transportation, and activities.

Accommodation: Lodging costs were high on this trip. A big reason for that was because we didn’t have much of an opportunity to use hotel points like we normally would. Either hotels that we could book with points were too far away from where we wanted to be, or the point costs were too high to make the redemption worth it. Costs were also high here because of Patagonia where the lodging options were limited and the places that were available were very expensive. If we’d booked this trip further in advance, that probably would have helped some, but we only decided to take this trip a few months before leaving so that wasn’t possible.

Splitting some of our accommodations four ways helped us save some money. While two bedroom places were more expensive, they often weren’t nearly twice as expensive, so the per person cost was less than it would have been if we were traveling by ourselves.

  • My total accommodation expenses: $2,140

Food and drink: We had few opportunities to cook on this trip, which meant we went to restaurants for the majority of our meals. Of course on the cruise, the food was all included in the total cost. And for one of the refugios (hostels) in Patagonia, we opted for full room and board which included meals since there were no other food options in this remote area of the national park. Since we didn’t have much opportunity to cook for ourselves, this meant costs were a little higher, but really not that bad overall. The food on the ship was very good, and besides the Chilean side of Patagonia, most of the other places had reasonably priced restaurant options.

  • My total food/drink expenses: $1,160

Transportation: Our costs for transportation weren’t too bad with all things considered. We rented a car twice in different parts of Patagonia, for a total of 12 days. While this wasn’t the least expensive option, it made things much easier than trying to book buses and get taxis to places we needed to go. It also wasn’t as bad when split four ways instead of two. Besides the car rentals, we did have to take a bus once and paid some fees on booking our flights. We were able to book all three of our major flights (Virginia -> Argentina, Argentina -> Ecuador, and Ecuador -> Virginia) with points, so we saved a lot there.

  • My total transportation expenses: $1,300

Activities: On this trip, we spent way more on activities than we normally do, but it was necessary for these bucket list destinations. The activities are really what made this trip so amazing. Some of the highlights included: a tango show in Buenos Aires; getting up close and personal with thousands of penguins in the Falkland Islands; doing some of the most epic hikes of our lives in various national parks in Patagonia (entry fee required); kayaking at Grey Glacier; doing a glacier trek on Perito Moreno Glacier; and, of course, seeing the most awe inspiring landscapes we’ve ever seen from the cruise ship while sailing around the Antarctic Peninsula. We have pictures of most of these things on our Instagram if you want to check them out, and Whitney will include more in her full recap post from this trip.

I also included our souvenirs, gifts for family/friends, and travel insurance in this section of expenses.

  • My total activity expenses: $1,390

This brings my total expenses for the entire trip (about 6 weeks), including accommodations, transportation, activities, and food/drink to approximately $5,990! This comes out to an average of $136/day!*

*Keep in mind this is only my part of the expenses, and does not include Whitney’s expenses.

Summary of My Expenses

The per day cost of this trip was actually really close to that of our last big trip around Europe, which was unexpected. With spending so much on the cruise and doing so many expensive activities on this trip, I expected it to be our most expensive trip yet.

For those interested, the cruise cost me right around $2,500, which accounts for lodging, food, activities, plus wifi and tips included for 16 days. Although, for us, spending $2,500 each for 16 days on a trip is a lot, it was a once in a lifetime experience and we’d do it again in a heartbeat. In fact, we very well may do it again with family in the future to show them what an amazing place Antarctica is.

Using points for our flights was a major help on costs. The flights would have probably been over $2,000 each in total without the points. I used 156,000 miles for my flights.

What’s Next?

We went into planning this trip thinking it would probably be our last long international trip for the foreseeable future (yes, yes, I know we’ve said that before).

We’ve been thinking a lot about settling down and starting a family lately, and now that we’ve gone just about everywhere that we wanted to go when we started these long trips back in 2018, this seems like the time.

We’ve now been to 56 countries and all 7 continents, in addition to having visited all of the U.S. states and U.S. National Parks!

Right now we don’t have any future long trips planned. We do still have some bucket list destinations we want to see eventually, although that list is much shorter than it used to be. We’ll undoubtedly still take some international trips in the future, we just aren’t sure if they’ll be the multi-month trips that we’re used to.

Stay tuned for what’s next on our journey! Be sure to follow us on  Instagram and on our Facebook page for real time updates and photos!

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