Whenever I look to book a hostel nowadays, I almost always gravitate towards one of the online booking services such as HostelWorld. Not only can you see a huge inventory of available hostels in the area, but you can also see reviews from recent visitors. Sometimes a hostel with a good rating will have a bunch of poor reviews recently due to something like construction noise nearby, so it is always a good idea to read the reviews in detail. For our trip to Cuzco, Peru, we decided to stay three nights in Cuzco upon arriving to eat some of the local cuisine and to help get our bodies acclimatized ...

Luciana and I headed to the airport around 1am last night, with plans to catch a flight at 3:50am for Lima. Obviously that's not an ideal flight time, but since it was heavily discounted we thought we could live with it. Another reason we booked that particular flight is that it was with TAM airlines, and they happen to be with Star Alliance. Since I'm going for Gold Status this year with Star Alliance, I welcomed the chance to get 6,000 more miles with them. Unfortunately when we got to the airport, TAM told us that we had to go over to LAN's counter and check-in with them. I said I was confused ...