Booking Inca Trail Tickets
Booking Inca Trail tickets in advance is a must. With the number of permits for walking the trail being finite each day it is essential to book early. But just how far in advance do you need to reserve your Peru Inca Trail trek to guarantee a place on this most famous of walks. Reading through many of the websites and marketing emails of various agencies selling trekking in Peru, you would think that you need to be reserving your place for next year on the Inca Trail already. I will explain why this is not quite true.
Advantages of booking inca trail tickets in advance
There is no doubt that getting all your holiday plans sorted for next year early is a great idea, especially after the chaos of the last year or so. On certain dates hotels in Cusco and Aguas Calientes do almost sell out, and with the quantities of people that will be desperate to travel after lockdowns, even greater pressure may be felt. Spaces on certain trains become scarce, leaving you with a less desirable time of your train to Machu Picchu or in the case of those hiking the Inca Trail, perhaps leaving you with less choice of train times back to Cusco.
Reserving your Inca Trail trek early also allows agencies such as ours to get all the ducks in a row. At the end of the day, this is Latin America and anything could happen, planning early means there are fewer elements to juggle with later, internal flights and other transport can be secured at good prices and times.
When do Inca Trail tickets go on sale?
Despite all these very good reasons for booking your Inca Trail hike for next year now, the truth is that Inca Trail permits do not actually go on sale until the January of the year you want to travel. Anyone who tells you any differently is not telling the truth. Once permits do go on sale, they tend to start selling very fast, and some dates sell out straight away, especially for March and April. So while you should not be fooled by the marketing hype put forward by some agencies, it certainly does make sense to get booking your Inca Trail hike now, so that come the first few days of January when the tickets go on sale, your tour operator is ready to get in the queue and buy your tickets. Remember that setting up an itinerary and planning a holiday also takes a bit of time. To book your Peru tour any operator will need a deposit, your booking form, and passport details, all of which can take a bit of time to send, especially over the Christmas period.
Making a decision early also allows companies like our to have some flexibility if your dates for the trek are not available. If this happens we can move the trek within your dates, moving certain visits or even reversing the whole itinerary so we get you on the trek. the earlier we do this the less problems there are, and avoiding cost increases.
Alternatives? If there is no way to get you on the Inca Trail!
The Inca Trail is quite rightly world-famous. It is the only trek that actually comes through the Sun Gate to Machu Picchu. In fact, it is the only trek where you actually arrive at Machu Picchu directly. All the others involve transport. There are only 500 spaces per day and about 300 of these will be taken up by the porters, guides, and cooks that are needed to run your trek.
Just let us deal with this for you but if you want to have a look you can go to the official website which gives Inca Trail availability, you need to click on “Consultas” and then click the far left drop-down menu to choose “Camino Inca”. That is how you can see how many spaces are left for the day you want to trek. Remember that can change at any moment. So when you see less than 100 spaces available you should probably start the booking process or be prepared to consider some alternatives, just speak to us for all these details. Its what we do!
