A procedure for the infiltration of planar photonic crystals (PhCs) with liquid crystals (LCs) is presented. InP-based PhCs are infiltrated with the nematic LC-K15 in a specially designed high-vacuum chamber. The infiltration technique is validated and systematically characterized by measuring the transmission through the infiltrated PhCs at different temperatures and for different polarizations. The reproducibility and reliability of our procedure are demonstrated and a high filling efficiency is obtained