Travel hacking is the art of discounted or free travel. It’s a great way to feed your travel addiction without going into serious debt for it. There are many forms of travel hacking from city hacking (find the chap stuff to do) or accommodation hacking. But the one hacking method after my own heart is miles hacking. How can I travel around the world for little to nothing? I wrote a series of article about how to fly for free which has tons of great insight and information about how to get started, methods for acquiring miles and how to meet credit card minimum spending limits.
It’s such a huge subject, it’s hard to know where to start. I put together an online powerpoint (below) using Prezi, a fun out of the box way to do powerpoint and it is included below. I hope you find it as interesting as I did creating it.
Miles Hacking Example
On a side note and since I am in the ‘how do I fly cheaply? zone‘. I was playing around with my United award miles and stopovers this morning. I was curious to see if I could book a couple flights using a stopover and open jaw. An open–jaw ticket is a round-trip ticket in which the traveler does not arrive to the same city of departure and/or does not depart from the same city where they first landed. For example, a flight from NYC to Paris and returning back to NYC from London, not your original destination. Anyways, I spent 10 minutes on United portal and put into their system the following combination of cities for a Feb 2016 departure, returning back to the US sometime in March ( I am lucky that I can be so flexible). I found a flight from Washington DC to Istanbul & Istanbul to Florence & Rome back to Washington DC for 60k award miles and $111.
That is HUGE!! I signed up for a miles credit card which automatically gave me 45k + plus the miles I got for making my minimum spend purchases and some miles I am accrued on a United shopping portal and bam, I have 60k+ miles and can book this ticket next year
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