Somewhere in my constant travels I learned an important lesson: you can be at peace wherever you are, or you can be anxious wherever you are. Circumstances aren’t completely irrelevant, and a comfortable environment certainly helps. But circumstances only go so far—feeling good or bad doesn’t depend on what’s happening around you. I remember shivering…
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I was flying to Sydney via Los Angeles and Brisbane, but at the moment it didn’t matter. What mattered was: I was heading out to see the world. I touched down in LAX via the Greyhound of the West Coast skies, otherwise known as Alaska Airlines. Heading outside, I blinked at the flashing lights of…
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I didn't begin travel hacking until long after I began traveling. At first, I did what everyone else did—I had a couple of Frequent Flyer accounts, I looked online when buying tickets, I tried to comparison shop and get the best deal I could, but I didn't know much about the tricks of the trade.
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Over the course of ten years, I visited every country in the world, many of them several times. When I first started writing about the quest, the most common question I received was, “But how do you pay for that?” Since then I've tried to be very clear on how much it costs to travel—not just for me, but for anyone else. In this post, and in the follow-up on Thursday, I'll outline my general response to travel and money.
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I did an interview about Liberia with the people behind Maptia, and I liked the introspective questions they asked. You can read the full article here, or check out an excerpt below.
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On Sunday I went down to San Francisco, met up with my friend Stephanie and began preparing for the day-long CreativeLIVE workshop on travel hacking. The session was fun and intense! Comments and questions for the #travelhackLIVE hashtag were so numerous that the course began a trending topic on Twitter. Viewers crashed Stephanie’s website at…
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Tomorrow I'll be teaHappy Thanksgiving to everyone in Canada!
Tomorrow I'll be teaching a day-long workshop on Travel Hacking. You can enroll here and watch for FREE from anywhere in the world.
In preparation for teaching the course tomorrow, I thought I'd compile a few—okay, many—notes on the best current travel hacking opportunities. If you'd like to see the world, or at least travel without spending a lot of money, perhaps something in this extended post will be helpful to you. Enjoy!
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I woke up yesterday and there was a typhoon outside my window. Whoa. I usually miss all the fun, but in this case I managed to stick around for part of the storm.
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It's time for another round of the infamous Frequent Flyer Challenge, where I show readers how to earn hundreds of thousands of miles and points that can be exchanged for free travel everywhere.
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It's a fairly typical island, as these things go. It took a while to make it here, with connecting flights through Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur. It operates on island time, where breakfast goes until 11am and happy hour is at least a four-hour period beginning in the late afternoon and continuing indefinitely.
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When I awoke in Kowloon harbor at 4am, I knew it was a good sign. The previous day I had flown 13 hours from San Francisco to Hong Kong with only a brief nap on the flight. Arriving at 8pm local time, I went to my hotel, settled in, and crashed out well before midnight.…
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In more than a decade of frequent travel, I’ve stayed everywhere from five-star hotels to sleeping on the ground—and I don’t mean camping, I mean sleeping on the ground with my bags next to me. As I roamed the planet during my quest to visit every country, I had all sorts of difficulties—especially with visas—but…
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Last weekend I had the honor of speaking to 600 people at Frequent Traveler University, a conference devoted to the world of points and miles.
A longtime friend, Gary Leff, asked me to share a few lessons from the 11-year journey to every country that just wrapped up a few weeks ago in Norway. What have I learned? Good question. I thought about it for a while and here are some of the highlights I came up with. Read More
I came into Abu Dhabi on the 13 hour flight from Washington, DC. It's a new service and they're advertising it everywhere around town. In the airport they have a real lounge, not just the contracted one they use in JFK. I touched down at 8pm and caught up quickly at baggage claim, sitting down and hammering out email replies and seeing what changed in the world overnight while I was eating Indian food and sleeping on my lie-flat Etihad bed.
Outside I took a car to the Aloft hotel, which I had booked for the night—or technically, the next 9 hours. In the early morning I'd be back out again, having failed at my attempt to change the ticket to allow for a day's stopover before hitting up Istanbul. No matter. There's always time to sleep, but not always time to live. Read More
left Norway and began a slow journey home via the Pacific. I'm writing these notes from a Cathay Pacific flight to Tokyo, where I'll transfer on to Los Angeles after staying one night.
After the end of the world in Oslo, a lot of people have been asking:
How does it feel to visit every country in the world?
How does it feel? It feels good. I'm the same person as I was last week, and I haven't been equipped with magical powers or instant sagacity—but it's fun to know that it all worked out.
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