I’m stealing the name of another Saverocity blogger for this post – I hope our approach to travel will resonate with someone, or open a few eyes to a philosophy I don’t see much of. I call it ‘traveling without expectations’. Of course we do expect some basic level of service and safety. Otherwise, we’ll see things we don’t see at home, we’ll learn from people with different worldviews and cultures, we’ll enjoy as much of this beautiful planet as time allows, and we’ll sleep when we get home. [continue reading…]
In the last sweet spot post, we looked at Miami and other Florida Avios booking sweet spots. Let’s move north to the other five East Coast cities with BA partner service to much of the rest of the eastern U.S. as well as international service: Boston, Charlotte, New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. The goal here is to identify sweet spots based on your origin city which we are compiling in the Award Sweet Spots By Origin page under the Resources tab at the top of the page. [continue reading…]
One of the better ‘little’ credit card offers out there is the Alaska Airlines card offered by Bank of America. Sure, the bonus is usually only 25K-30K but you can get as many card accounts and bonuses as you need, one every few months or so. Or so say the credit card guides. But they don’t bother to warn you what may happen once you have a card or two open. [continue reading…]
If anyone were to choose a location to live based on travel hacking award seat availability, they should look long and hard at South Florida. Not that I’m suggesting anyone actually move there just for an extra travel hacking edge. But we might be thinking about it, or jealous anyway. [continue reading…]
Southwest Airlines – the big little airline that many frequent travelers love to ignore. It’s abbreviated WN, which makes perfect sense unless you think about it. The airline that pops up on the big blogs when the affiliate links jump up to 50K points and then disappears in favor of pictures of champagne, toilets, rubber ducks, and caviar. Our family luvs WN, all the time! [continue reading…]
One thing I noticed during our trip to Alaska is the Alaskans’ pride in calling themselves the 49th state. So this sweet spot, one of the most-blogged-about, is for them and 50, Hawaii. And 31, 33, 42 and 48. Which, in case you’ve forgotten, are California, Oregon, Washington and Arizona in that order. [continue reading…]
Recently, Kenny wrote a post on how he helped another family travel with miles. Usually he will ask me to read over his posts and correct any grammar mistakes I find. While reading this post my head started spinning. I corrected some errors but told him that I didn’t have time to digest everything. Since then I’ve gone back and tried to understand it all. I’ve never gotten into the whole mileage game – although I do enjoy the benefits immensely. Anyways, back to this post. I found this one really hard to follow and tried to make sense of it. I really think that Kenny’s ADD came into play in a big way in this post. [continue reading…]
Meet Martha, whose real name is not Martha. She loves to ski and travel with her two daughters and husband (Jack, whose name is probably not Jack – I have no idea), using miles and points to stretch her travel resources as far as possible. Like us, her family uses San Antonio as their primary home airport, and she contacted me looking for a way to possibly improve her plans for the next year. [continue reading…]
We’re working on a series of origin-based award program sweet spots, compiled in the Award Sweet Spots by Origin section of the Resources tab at the top of the page. This one might be a little bit of a curve ball but I think it deserves a lot more attention than it gets: For 10,000 Frontier miles each way, you can get from much of the U.S. to some of our nation’s greatest treasures including Alaska [continue reading…]
This is part of a series on origin-based award program sweet spots which will be compiled in the Award Sweet Spots by Origin section of the Resources tab at the top of the page. Like the last one covering the Eastern half of the country, this one is a little fuzzy around the edges. But for 22,000 ANA points, most of the Western half of the U.S. can get to Cancun or the Pacific shores of Mexico, [continue reading…]