Travel Hacking Everyone Can Do

dmitry | Feb. 7, 2021, 8 p.m.

I was privileged to travel during my childhood, before later living though several years as an early teen without travel. I was keen to travel again at the age of 16-17 but I was also conscious of the cost. The travel I was accustomed to was not luxurious by any means (I remember staying at a bleak Soviet style hotel in St. Petersburg with inedible breakfasts to be a particular delight). 

The first time I led the effort to plan and organize an international trip was for my mother and me to Jordan. Back then, just using an online metasearch engine for flights (Skyscanner) and hotel accommodations (Booking.com) was revolutionary for my family. Skyscanner for me in particular was fascinating; plugging in different airport pairs, seeing what prices came up for different dates, all helped me give good intuition for price profiles for my nearest airports. Once I started organizing my own international travel, I really played with Skyscanner to create wild and complex itineraries (sometimes on separate tickets, meaning that flight delays on one ticket leaves you vulnerable to missing the other ticket's flights with no automatic right of being rebooked on other flights). A better way to do this requires the use of ITA Matrix, now owned by Google (here's a guide for using it).

Sleeping in airports became quite frequent, although uncomfortable (I don't sleep on airport floors) and hungry (airport food options late at night are sparse, which is how I learnt jerky is the only type of meat I hate). So did stopovers in some interesting locations, such as Warsaw, Rome and Budapest. Travel accommodations were also modest, although more than sufficient (my hostel in the city of Cancun itself rather than the hotel zone was just as memorable as my stay at a high-end hotel in Vancouver later on the same trip). To be fair transportation and accommodations could always be more modest (staying with friends/couchsurfing/WWOOFing and traveling the world by container ship are intriguing options yet to be explored by me personally). 

The next step of my evolution was to understand the power of credit card churning, and in the power of signup bonuses to rack up over time. There are many dedicated travel hacking blogs that detail this technique extensively, but the basic principle is to use credit cards as a way to not only accumulate points through everyday spending, but to reach spending milestones that activate the award of large point signup bonuses. Many credit cards offer such bonuses in different rewards programmes, and there are no penalties to applying for many cards over time, canceling them and then reapplying after a certain time to get the signup bonuses again.

Credit is not straightforward for temporary residents, but the allure of free trips was too enticing. Applying for my first American Express card required me to visit a lawyer that could certify a copy of my identity document by trekking through the snow and paying a sizeable fee (interestingly enough Canada's complex federal-provincial division of powers means that is one of the only countries in the world that does not follow the international Apostille convention).

The next stage was to delve into the additional ways to earn rewards points, such as using a service like Plastiq to make large payments such as rent through a credit card (at a fee of course), purchasing electronics through an online rewards programme portal (such as Aeroplan's eStore or Airmiles shops), taking advantage of special bonus point promotions for purchases through partners (Airmiles runs such promotions several times a year), using Rocketmiles to make hotel reservations since they offer points bonuses for each reservation, and reading into the redemption sweet spots for different rewards programmes. 

There are several deeper levels of travel hacking that I have yet to approach (see this blog post to get a better understanding of how deep down this rabbit hole you can go), but my hard work did come together in 2019 to pay for two round trip flight to Australia in business class (albeit through a convoluted itinerary that took me around the world through Swiss Airlines, Air Canada, Air India, Singapore Airlines), three weeks of modest hotel accommodations and intra-Australia flights (including the pricy flights to Tasmania and Kangaroo Island). I enjoyed the guava juice on Air India, the breakfast on Air Canada, the fancy airport lounges (United Airlines' Polaris Lounge was excellent with their sit-down restaurant, although I was sad to see Movenpick ice-cream no longer offered at Swiss' lounge) and the comfortable seats in business class, but all of it pales in comparison to the experience of actually visiting new countries. Not for me is travel simply to experience the newest luxury flight seat; for me its the stories I experience and the people I meet,