I’ve spent more than 15 years valuing assets and deciding when to buy and sell dollars on other people’s behalf, and it still took me a while to apply that same discipline to myself: I had never looked at a year-end plane ticket as a treasury decision. This year I did, and the numbers change the conversation.
What’s real
The Colombian peso has appreciated 19.35% so far in 2026 (as of September 18), the strongest currency among 21 emerging-market peers, well ahead of the Brazilian real’s 5.77% (Portafolio). The official exchange rate closed Friday at COP 3,329.61 per dollar. That’s not an abstract number: it’s the difference between a hotel in Rome feeling expensive or feeling reasonable.
What nobody tells you
This window probably won’t last. Portafolio itself reported that the peso “may have already exhausted much of its strengthening,” with a projected year-end range of COP 3,400-3,650 (Portafolio). And there’s a second, subtler trap: December in Cartagena —local peak season— can cost as much or more than flying somewhere else entirely. A mid-range budget in Cartagena runs $50-80 a day in normal season, but December sends flights and hotels soaring (Bonaitur). Meanwhile, in Rome the year-end season adds 20-30% on top of an already roughly $240-a-day mid-range budget (BudgetYourTrip), and in New York you need to add another 15-20% just in tips and service charges on top of a $235-385 daily budget (Packzup). The real cost is rarely the one in the first Google result.
Where your money goes further this December
The opportunity lies in comparing with real numbers, not intuition. Panama, being a dollarized economy, directly absorbs that ~19% peso appreciation against the dollar, has lower inflation than the U.S., and according to Kayak has the cheapest average year-end 2026 airfare of any destination (Infobae). Miami, against the instinct that everything in the U.S. is expensive, actually saw flights drop 8% and hotels drop 16% versus last year, per the same Kayak data (El Colombiano). And watch out for Argentina: the Argentine peso lost 54% of its value since 2024, but local prices rose at nearly the same pace, so the “exchange-rate discount” Buenos Aires seems to promise has largely eroded — Colombia remains cheaper than Argentina in nearly every category; the real difference is cultural offerings, not your wallet (Secrets of Buenos Aires).
Judgment, not habit
None of this means “don’t travel locally” or “spend it all because the peso is strong.” It means what we call, at Criterio Financiero, Understanding the Context: before booking, understand what your money actually buys this December, in this specific country, on this specific date — not what it bought a year ago, and not what you assume out of habit. And it means Reasoning from fundamentals: a cheaper flight to Panama with a strong peso can be a better financial decision than the “usual” Cartagena vacation at peak-season prices, even if the second option feels more familiar.
Travel, done with judgment, isn’t an expense you have to justify — it’s one of the cheapest ways to buy perspective. Seeing how a different economy works, how an exchange rate behaves on the street rather than on a screen, how much life costs somewhere else — that trains financial judgment as much as any course would. The question I ask myself before booking isn’t “can I afford this?” anymore. It’s “which decision, with today’s numbers, gets me more for what I’m going to spend anyway?”
Have you already run those numbers for your year-end trip, or are you booking out of habit?
If you want to keep tracking the dollar and the exchange rate before buying your ticket, I’ll see you in the ViSFI Daily Briefing — and if this was useful, share it with whoever is planning their year-end trip right now.