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How to Fly 35,000 Miles, Visit 4 Continents, 9 Countries, and 15 Cities for $418
- kondro 16y agoSounds like fun but the guy must shop to get to the following points in 11 months: 130,000 American Airline miles 105,000 British Airways Miles 40,000 Starwood Preferred Guest points 25,000 American Express points I'm only guessing at the spend required for that many points but surely that is $200k - $300k in spend. Surely this blog post isn't accessible to everyone. Having said that, I admire his sense of adventure to just pull-up stops from his life and travel the world for 9 months. It is something I really need to get around to myself.
- noodle 16y agoits not as difficult as you would think, its more a matter of effort and ability. i readily recognize i could have almost double the miles i currently do if i put more energy into it.
- lukeschlather 16y agoI'd rather put my energy into freelancing or volunteering.
- noodle 16y agothats not exactly what i mean. for example, last month, i could've earned about 5000 more points by eating at different restaurants, instead of the ones i actually went to. would've required a bit of planning and a bit of effort. and eating food that i might not have particularly wanted to eat at that point in time, but the time/effort spent doing so wouldn't have amounted to much in the way of freelancing or volunteering. point is, min/maxing is possible with rewards points, and people do it.
- Psyonic 16y ago"I'm sorry we can't go to that place for our date... we have to go to this chain restaurant, because it gives me more rewards points..." For some reason, I don't see that going over well (unless she's a travel nerd as well, I suppose)
- lukeschlather 16y agoWell, yes, but you could probably have earned/saved even more money money by not going to restaurants at all. If I'm going to a restaurant, it's a luxury, not a chore, and if I'm doing chores, I'll just go do chores.
- noodle 16y agoi think you miss the point. minimal change = more than minimal results.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoNot if you play the system, particuarly 'sign-up bonuses' designed to lure new customers (who will then not be bothered to switch). The OP uses an example - AA Citi Cards currently give you 75,000 miles if you spend $4,000 in 6 months. Using that as a base measurement (even though I'm now probably stretching the math too far in the other direction) he could rack up 300,000 miles spending $16,000. Very easy, especially if you also have some business expenses.
- kondro 16y agoSeems like reward points programs are much better in the USA than in Australia -_-
- JacobAldridge 16y agoI'm pretty sure they are, especially now due to the greater economic disparity between the two countries. On a completely unrelated note, it's great to see a fellow Qlder on HN.
- kondro 16y agoThere's more of us than you'd think ;)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- noodle 16y agohuh... interesting post, because i'm in the process of building up miles in order to do the exact same thing. glad to know it works
- mgkimsal 16y agoIt's certainly cost this person a lot more than $418, because most of this seemed to be earned with credit card reward points. Spend $4k in 6 months and get 75,000 points, etc. So.. great. Spend a lot of money (possibly buying more than you intended to) and get a reward. I guess being on the other side of the table - a merchant - I resent the whole 'rewards' racket. A) I end up getting charged more as a merchant, and I can't not accept your card. B) It's encouraged a culture of chasing after rewards that often aren't really something you need or end up being hard to use for most people (airline miles). Yes, there are a few people who can really 'make out' (like this guy) but in the end this is mostly just another way for banks to make extra profits off people's greed ('something for nothing'). "If I were to pay for this adventure with cash and book individual flights, it would cost almost $6,000" I'm guessing there was a lot more than $6k spent on 'stuff' to get this.
- dlnovell 16y agoIf you put everything you buy on your card it's not hard to rack up points really quick - especially if you can find a way to get your landlord to put your rent on your credit card. My wife and I are flying to NYC soon for free on this year's miles.
- mgkimsal 16y agoRent is typically a big one - outside of that, maybe I just don't spend that much compared to everyone else? Outside of mortgage, if we spend $1000 in a month on combined food/utilities/misc, it's a busy month. That would be 12000 points based on most cards offering "$1=1 point". That just doesn't seem to get me around the world trips. I'd rather just save up and buy what I want. Maybe I'm missing something blindingly obvious though? I can't help but think banks and card providers aren't going in to debt to provide these rewards. The price is baked in to costs to cover the extra fees banks charge when rewards card holders use their card.
- stretchwithme 16y agoget a card that pays 1% back in cash and don't bother with points. better yet, get a card that gives you 3% when you buy gas or 5% back when you buy stuff at a store you shop at anyway (Target does this, for example). if you're clever, cash can be amazingly flexible. its easy to redeem and accepted in most places.
- Edmond 16y agoMaybe he travels for work...easy to do if you charge expenses to your personal card and get reimbursed.
- goatforce5 16y agoIf you're flying a fair bit anyway, I recommend you look in to doing an AA Platinum Challenge. http://www.flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php/Challenge_(AA) http://www.flyerguide.com/wiki/index.php/Challenge_(AA) It'll help you get bonus miles for flights you're doing anyway, and AA is actually not a bad airline when you have decent status with them.
- ben1040 16y agoThis was the best advice I was ever given before taking a job that had me traveling 4500 miles a week. If I didn't do the challenge, I would have left 50,000 bonus miles and a bunch of upgrade stickers on the table. At the time it was free to do, so there was no downside, but if you're going to fly enough to qualify for platinum or executive platinum anyway the fee for the challenge is well worth it to get the bonus miles and priority boarding that much sooner.
- goatforce5 16y agoI'm a little taller than average, so being able to prebook exit rows for free even when travelling on the cheapest economy ticket was worth it's weight in gold (or platinum. Ho ho!). I was doing a lot of transatlantic at the time, so it really was a big deal. Your status must come up when you book ("Oh, you travel with us a lot. We'll just ignore the overweight bag fees today then...") and on the passenger manifest (more than once I had free drinks given to me, or better brands of drinks brought back from First). Now that I have no status they don't go out of their way to do those things, despite having a ton of miles i'm slowly working through, and a bunch of unusable upgrade stickers. Meh. The recent flight to Hawaii paid for with some of my miles made up for that though.
- ronnier 16y agoI did just that. Earned a lot of mileage traveling internationality, then took a big trip on airline miles. I'm at 30 countries in total now and still have a lot of miles. http://ronnie.me/gallery http://ronnie.me/gallery if you'd like to see.
- chrisaycock 16y agoHe gets most of his points for sign-up bonuses. He doesn't say the exact number, but it looks like he registered for at least four cards in the span of a year. Applying for a lot of credit in a short amount of time is a great way to hurt his credit score! I wish he'd write a follow-up about what happened to his credit after this experiment.
- Estragon 16y agoThe US fetish with credit scores mystifies me. (I've lived in the US for 15 years.) Especially with the economy in its current state, why would you want credit at the moment?
- whimsy 16y agoIf you do need to borrow money, having a good credit score allows you to get better interest on loans in the U.S. I think the question you're really wondering about, though, is why someone would borrow a significant amount of money given the state of the economy. I don't have good answers to that question.
- brc 16y agoIf you have a relatively stable income, when the economy is at its lowest ebb is the best time to borrow money and invest. You'll have less competition for the money and less competition for the investments you buy. Finally, the stated policy of the Federal reserve is to inflate the currency. This damages savers and rewards borrowers. The smart thing to do right now is to borrow and invest in things that provide a real return over the pitifully low interest rate.
- Estragon 16y agoIt's the best time to invest, sure. I don't know about borrowing to invest, though...
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- travisp 16y agoIf you spend 250,000 frequent flyer points on a vacation, it's not free. This is not just because you had to spend money to get those points (which might have been spent on cash back credit cards for example), but because those points have value (almost as a separate currency) that could be spent on other things (and not just flights). But, he still got a great deal using the OneWorld Awards program and it's definitely a great option for those who have the free time to do this.
- AlfaWolph 16y agoSo he's Tim Ferriss Jr?
- aeurielesn 16y agoUnfortunately, I am not my own boss so I am more concerned on how to get those 6 months to spent.
- xutopia 16y agoI heard about a hack that allowed you to purchase bonds or something with your credit card and then reselling those bonds while racking up air miles. It was all possible until there was a crack down. This guy essentially did just that.
- steveb 16y agoFor a time you could buy U.S. savings bonds online with a credit card. So the common trick was: 1) Get a rewards credit card (Citi had at 5% rebate card at the time if you wanted cash, but there were also other rebate cards like frequent flier miles.) 2) Purchase bonds at treasurydirect.gov. (I bonds were a favorite at the time, the fixed rate was over 1%.) The ability to buy savings bonds with a credit card was ended in 2003. http://www.treasurydirect.gov/news/faq/faq.htm http://www.treasurydirect.gov/news/faq/faq.htm
- babblefrog 16y agoAnother possibility is buying US dollar coins at the US Mint website for face value.
- matwood 16y agoFor a time you could buy coins from the US mint and IIRC, they had free shipping. People would buy thousands of dollars worth of coins and then go turn them into the bank and pay off the card while gaining all the points.
- ashbrahma 16y agoHere's the link to buying coins. There is a $1000 limit for every 10 day period. http://catalog.usmint.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=10001&catalogId=10001&identifier=8100 http://catalog.usmint.gov/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Category...
- jsvaughan 16y agoand be personally responsible for nearly 7 tons of CO2 emissions
- joelrunyon 16y agofairly sure the planes would be going to the destinations regardless of whether he redeemed his FF miles or not.
- dotBen 16y agoyes this is a whole another argument that as a geek I get frustrated about. Not flying on a given trip doesn't reduce the amount of CO2 because the plane will fly anyway and either the weight reduction difference will be negligible in terms of CO2 or they'll just take more freight. Then the counter argument to that is that if enough people don't fly the airplane won't fly at all... But that would just make it commercially infeasible to operate many routes and in turn whole airlines and then we just have a complete deterioration of the airline industry.
- jsvaughan 16y agoI'm surprised that this got downvoted, and you're both wrong; your argument is equivalent to saying that there's no point voting as you're only one vote in a big population. Do people really care this little about the environment?
- dotBen 16y agoso yes, I do care about the environment. Air travel is something that concerns me, but of all the contributors to green-house gasses it is one of the ones that I see hardest to change/decrease. Case in point - I come from London but live in San Francisco and there is no other (reasonable) way to travel between the two cities other than by air. I don't get how my argument is like voting. If we all vote together then something positive happens (change). If we all 'vote' by not flying then the airline industry collapses - which is not positive. If I've miss-understood your example + argument please elaborate.
- snewe 16y agoImportant caveat: "I’m not kidding when I say that I spent probably more than 24 total hours in the past three weeks having a blast on this thing creating itineraries, checking mileage, and figuring out where the heck I could go without going over the limit."
- salvadors 16y agoThe "having a blast" part is important. I've built similar trips myself, and playing with all these tools, finding interesting routes etc can be great fun (like discovering a way to get from Kyrgyzstan to Austria via Ethiopia and Jordan at no additional cost). It's a form of hacking that can be just as addictive as any other, and has the added benefit of helping you see lots of the world cheaply!
- megaframe 16y agoIt's anice idea... If I could only take a 9 month vacation and retain my job :-(
- rjett 16y agoHow does a stunt like this affect your credit rating?
- JimboOmega 16y agoEvery time you apply for a new card, you lose a few points; it falls off after a couple years (2 or 3, I forget). There are people who make a game of applying for cards as fast as their credit rating will allow (I think 700 is roughly the floor, below which you stop applying). If the company tries to charge an annual fee, you call them up, try to negotiate out of it, and if they won't, you cancel the card. Having too many cards isn't that bad of a thing (as long as they are with different issuers). It can be a good thing, because part of your credit score is the amount of credit you are using out of your total credit. Like everything else, you game your credit score... there is no real value to having it be perfect high, you just need "good", so you get approved. Also, the miles that are best come from getting new CCs... not from spending. There is usually a minimum spend to get the initial bonus... but after you do that, you can move on to another card, and get far more than $1/mile. For instance I got a card that gave me 75k miles for $1500 in spending.
- acgourley 16y agoI feel it takes so much mental energy to hack rewards cards that it's a net loss. He's obviously bright, I'm sure he could have used his time simply earning enough money to take his dream vacation. As far as rewards go, amazon's reward card gives a good return without cognitive effort.
- sanj 16y agoIf he's enjoy it, which he appears to be, then he's having fun hacking as well as getting a near-free vacation. I'm certain that fiddling with my 30 year old pinball machine is a net loss. But I'm going to do it anyhow.
- acgourley 16y agoFine about about this: instead of creating value he's extracting value.
- ssharp 16y agoI thought this was going to be about some super-ineffcient international route, featuring multi-day layovers that was offered for $418 by a carrier.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- stevenwei 16y agoCool scheme. For that amount of travel I feel like he should have collected more miles and gone for the first class award (280,000 airline miles required for the same distance flown). Sure, it requires twice as many miles, but if you're going to be flying multiple transcontinental flights, first class is nothing to scoff at. The total cash value of that many first class flights is going to be far north of $100k, so in some sense you're also getting more value out of it.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- 9ec4c12949a4f3 16y agoReally? HN thinks this is a good article? Wtf happened to this place? "I traveled around the world for cheap because I have points. How did I get points? I collected points with cards. LOL POINTS" Thanks for wasting my time.
- bonsaitree 16y agoI can't help but be reminded of "hacking" casino comp systems. Please. In truth, this trip cost well in excess of $418 due to the other purchases and time tie-ins involved. I'm all for leveraging advantages, but there's leveraging, and then there's outright "gaming". The former can yield value when you factor in your time & attention, reasonable workflow safety margins, and compliance with spirit of a policy. The latter is merely a mental exercise to optimize a series of transactions around a single parameter, in this case the present dollar cost, to the complete exclusion of externalities. At least he got some follow-on web traffic for his efforts.
- ashconnor 16y agoRefferal code in the ebook link, you have to be kidding me.
- gregparadee 16y ago$5000 to the winner? Wasent Facebook Chat developed my an intern? I would assume $5000 and a chance to work for Facebook would be a better price.