Big Travel, Small Budget: How to Travel More, Spend Less, and See the World by Shauers Ryan

Author:Shauers, Ryan [Shauers, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2015-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

Katie’s Story

Katie Benedetto Jones is a friend that I met at the annual World Domination Summit (also put on by Chris Guillebeau), which is a conference that aims to connect and inspire people living somewhat unconventional lives. I saw that she just booked an amazing trip thanks to travel hacking, so I asked her if she’d be willing to share the details. Here’s Katie’s story:

I just booked two separate major trips, the first of which is an upcoming tour of Europe across six cities stretching between Madrid and Zurich, which cost me only $271 out of pocket.

The second trip will take me around the world and through 12 cities between Europe, the Middle East, India, and Eastern Asia. The total cost out of pocket was just $317.25.

For less than $600 (in taxes and fees for each stop on the trip), I will get to travel across Europe for a few weeks and later around the world over the course of a month.

The booking is actually three separate trips and only cost 40,000 miles for the European tour (through American Airlines), and 82,500 miles for the world tour (40,000 on American and 42,500 with United—two independent trips).

My initial plan was to try to use these miles to get two trips—one to India and one to Spain. Working with the flight booking service FlightFox, I was able to turn these otherwise straightforward trips into something truly incredible. For instance, I didn’t know that you could get up to three 24-hour layovers on each hop—so what started out as a simple trip to India turned into something like a world tour! The Spain trip turned into something more adventurous, too.

You can also use “open-jaw” flights whereby you fly into one city and fly out of another, creating a gap in your travel that you can fill by other means—traveling by train or bus for example. I left an open-jaw between Prague and Istanbul where I will then continue flying on to India.

Using stopovers and open-jaw segments, you can visit more places for the same price in frequent flier miles. Why see one country when you can see a few?

If you’ve got the airline miles but don’t have the knowledge and experience in booking more complicated flights, you can use a service like FlightFox to do some pretty amazing things. In total for booking these three separate trips they charged me $120. Well worth the price!

In reality, I really hate credit cards. The first time I tried travel hacking, I’d been used to using a debit card for everything, so I started to be afraid of my finances for the first time in my life. I tried travel hacking again in order to get these trips, and this time I paid off my credit card immediately, which helped a bunch.

With credit card travel hacking I found that it was quite easy to meet the minimum spend requirements, but a little difficult to have confidence that the miles would come through. The miles my offer

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