How Is It Possible That a Month in Chile Costs Less Than a Week?

A reader of my main blog, Casual Kitchen, emailed me with some great questions about how we planned out our experiences in Chile. I thought readers curious about the logistics (and costs) of longer-term travel might find it useful, so I've shared an edited version of the email exchange below.

Enjoy! And as always, if you have questions you'd like to ask Laura or me about our travels, leave a comment below or email me.
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Dear Dan:
I hope you are doing well and are not having too hard a time adjusting to life back in the U.S.

I wondered if you could tell me how you arranged for your visit to Chile. Did you make all the arrangements yourself, or was it through an organization? I’m just not sure how and when we could do something like this because of work and money, but my husband is urging me to try to figure out a way to take the kids to France, since they’ve been studying French for several years.
--An Interested Reader

Hi AIR:
Regarding our Chile experience, we arranged the logistics ourselves. We started by selecting a major city in a relatively advanced country--mainly for convenience (we were on a mission to improve our Spanish, so we put a high priority on being somewhere where we could focus on our studies rather than worrying about security or where to get bottled water, etc).

We're also involved in Couchsurfing, and I used that as my initial attempt to locate a Spanish language school in Santiago. I just asked the three or four most heavily involved people from Santiago's Couchsurfing network which school they'd recommend. Amazingly, each of them put me in touch with the same person, the director of Escuela Fronteras! We did a little more due diligence on the school and then we just picked it.

But we knew that in a huge city like Santiago, with some 6 million people, there would be other good Spanish language schools, so to be perfectly honest, I didn't worry too much which school we chose. After all, if our school sucked (which it absolutely didn't), we could finish our first 3 week course and then just go to another school. Ironically, I think it was that attitude that led us to have a mindset of being open to whatever happened to us, and it led us to what turned out to be a truly great school. We even became friends with the school's director and her husband--and they're going to come and visit us in NJ later this year.

Regarding money: There's a huge misconception out there that long term travel has to be expensive. The reality is that going someplace for 2-3 months can cost the same (yep, the same) as going to that same place for just one week. I find myself evangelizing about this all the time, but most people just can't process this idea--they usually end up arguing with me or giving me blank stares.

But consider these facts:
1) You pay the same airfare to get there, regardless of the time spent. It doesn't matter whether you go for a week or for several months. And if you are going for months, you'll have the flexibility to grab the very cheapest airfares because it doesn't matter which days you fly.

2) In almost all cities, you can rent a decent apartment for a month or more for the same price as a week in a decent hotel.

3) The apartment you rent will have a kitchen which will enable you to cook at home. Result: still more savings.

4) Because you actually "live" in this city (meaning you aren't visiting it as a tourist on a rushed, tiring and overpriced schedule), you can have more profound experiences there. Which (again, counterintuitively) costs less, because it will involve fewer overpriced guided/packaged activities.

In Santiago, we ended up renting a really nice two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a doorman (who we constantly practiced Spanish with) and great neighbors (who we also practiced with and still email). And the cost was only about $1000 a month, including utilities, and it was in a nice neighborhood in one of South America's most expensive cities. Had we spent more time looking, I'm pretty sure we could have found even better prices.

One last thing: we did a homestay with a local host in Santiago for our first three weeks, which I strongly recommend. It really helped us with the language, and it helped us get grounded in the community (meaning: we were able to make much better decisions about where we wanted to live and HOW we wanted to live once we'd lived with this family for a week or so). Most importantly, we spoke minimal English during our stay with them, and it helped us build a habit of speaking only Spanish to each other when we went to live on our own. I'd look for a school that offers this if you can find one.

Hope that helps. If you have any more questions, just ask away!

Dan