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For the first time since publishing AONC in 2008, this year's travel roundup is quite different. Every other year, I've been to at least fifteen new countries (and many other countries I'd visited before). This time, my list is greatly abridged.
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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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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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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
Someone wrote in to say he had earned more than 400,000 Frequent Flyer Miles from learning about travel hacking in the past few months.
"That's amazing!" I said. "Great work!"
He had a question on how to earn even more miles and points.
Well, we can talk about that, I told him. There are always new strategies to practice, new opportunities to pursue.
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On a crisp morning in November, you find yourself waking up in the center of the universe. You look out your window and see 5th Avenue and the New York Public Library.
You step out of bed and feel the impact of three hours' time change from the west coast. It's 4:30am back there, your body informs you. But you have a mission ahead of you, and you can't be late.
The previous evening you had ordered breakfast for delivery and hesitated over the selection. At first you were thinking french toast, but then you remembered that Gary Leff recommends the lemon poppyseed pancakes. You're not usually a fan of lemon poppyseed, but you decide to trust Gary and give it a try.
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*Update: Looking for more recent travel hacking posts? They're over here. Last Tuesday night, I returned home from Australia, via Hong Kong and San Francisco. I was as jet lagged as ever, but I had an important travel hacking task to complete: the next day, I paid a trip to my local Office Depot, where I purchased $2,000 worth of gift cards that would eventually be deposited in a bank account. This purchase was an experiment. If all goes well, I'll be carefully making a number of additional purchases over the next few months, and perhaps even longer.
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I'm off the grid this week on my first vacation since ... forever. It's a little disorienting, but I'm working on it. A few items of random interest: The $100 Startup continues to race up the charts, returning to the New York Times Bestseller List again this week. Thanks so much for your support! We're planning to do more events in local cities during the first week of September.
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A few weeks ago I mentioned I had created a page on the site that lists current airline mileage credit card bonuses. With just a couple of new cards, you can earn 100,000 miles or more—and then book round-trip plane tickets all over the world. Much to my surprise, card bonuses have continued to get better and better over the past couple of years. It's never been easier to earn a large stash of points or miles that you can quickly convert to plane tickets and hotel stays.
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Coming back on my final flight from the South Pacific last night, I sat next to a business traveler. In between Blackberrying and reading legal files, she gave me her brief attention.
She asked: "Do you travel for work?"
I said: "Not really. I travel for life."
"That's interesting," she said as she returned to her files.
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Because when you leave behind the familiar, you can't help but be changed by the foreign.
Because comfort zones become constricting zones over time.
Because the world was meant to be experienced, not imagined ...
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Tomorrow I'll be headed to Madagascar, the final stop of my latest trip before I begin the long process of returning home. But at the moment, I've been spending the past three hours sitting on the floor of the bathroom during a brief stopover in Johannesburg. Why the bathroom? Because it's freezing here in Johannesburg—we're now in the middle of the southern hemisphere winter—and the only heater in my room is located by the sink.
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Chances are, you probably won't be visiting Angola anytime soon ... but it's always good to be prepared. Here's a starting point ...
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