I'm in Berlin. What a fun city! I'm excited to stay somewhere for three whole nights. I flew out of Doha's brand-new airport early this morning. Unbeknownst to me in advance, when I came in two days ago it was the very first day it was open—which of course was a mistake.
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Doha, the capital of Qatar, isn’t the kind of place you usually pop into without a task at hand. You might come on assignment for your company, or you could be transiting on Qatar Airways, or you might drop in because Qatar is a country and you’re on a mission to visit all of them.…
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Greetings from the road! I’m in Johannesburg and preparing to board a Qatar Airways flight to Doha. From there it’s Paris, Doha (again), London, New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas … in just over a week. What can I say—2014 is going to be a kick-ass year. Once the calendar rolled over to January 1,…
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Reentering the world of long-distance travel after a month’s absence, there’s a moment that comes when I realize what it’s all about. It’s hard to predict the precise arrival of the moment, but I never miss it. Sometimes the moment arrives in the taxi ride to the airport, but that’s usually too early. There’s still…
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Update: This post contains outdated offers and should only be used for reference. Click the following link for the most up-to-date offers on my favorite travel hacking cards. -cg — Last week I flew to one of my favorite countries. Ever since I first got stuck in Australia after being denied boarding for Nauru, it…
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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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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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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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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
Friends and readers, I hope you'll excuse a brief post today. I've been in Seoul, Korea for three jam-packed days, meeting thousands of people. Yeah, thousands ... it's been intense. So far we've done more than a dozen events and filming sessions, including one that ended yesterday at midnight.
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Last week I posted the Return of the Frequent Flyer Challenge—my latest plan to restock the miles I use to go all over the world for nearly-free. A few people said that 250,000 miles was not enough of a challenge ... so I've increased the goal. The new plan is to earn at least 400,000 miles or points in the next two weeks, and I'm now halfway there.
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