Travel Hacking

One thing that made this whole trip possible was my realization that I wouldn't have to pay for this ticket. It took a while to figure that out and do my research, but boy has it paid off. At first I had no idea where I wanted to go and how I was going to do it, but when there's a will there's a way.

I mentioned my idea of a trip to my friend Mark and he told me about "credit card churning" or "travel hacking" as some call it that got him some free flights and hotels around southeast asia. The basic idea is to get a credit card that has a sign up bonus where if you spend X amount of money you get Y amount of points for some reward program. One of the best ones at the time were some American Airlines cards where you could get 75,000(!) bonus points if you spend $1500 on the card within the first 3 months. Even better, you can get more than one of those cards that has a slightly different spending limit. Then I was remembered reading a post on Gizmodo a while back and found out that I could get a HUGE reward ticket with AAdvantage points. I called American Airlines and planned out a mock itinerary so they could give me a quote. They said 160k for economy and 220k for business. Ok, with 2 of those 75k credit cards and little extra, I could easy make that happen.

I called my mom about my plan and after talking with her I discovered that she had over 100k miles in her account already! She travels a lot and has credit cards that get her AAdvantage points as she uses them. Now I could see that 220k business class ticking becoming more in reach, and my mind was set. To do this, however, my mom would have to get the credit cards under her name and her AAdvantage number, and then she could buy the ticket for me.

Fortunately she agreed to help out, and since she runs a business hitting those limits wasn't too much of a problem. In a matter of less than 3 months she had around 250k miles in her account. Nice. I finalized my itinerary and prepared to make the big call to the AAdvantage rewards desk.

I woke up the morning before I called AA and had a little scare with the top headline of the news reading "American Airlines files for chapter 11 bankrupcy." I called immediately; I didn't want to get caught with a bunch of useless rewards points for being 1 day late! Fortunately, for customers that doesn't really mean anything other than maybe they'll have less flights sometime in the future.

After many hours and days of talking to the AAdvantage reps, I finally had a priced out itinerary that still only cost 220k miles, whew. It was such a large itinerary that their system was having some trouble processing it, resulting in much time on hold.

Of course nothing is without its surprises, and I got caught off guard twice! Apparently I hadn't done quite enough research.

Surprise #1: Every flight in the trip counts as a "segment," even if it's just a connecting flight. The only place this screwed me was when I was trying to go from Rio to Mumbai. There are no direct flights there, so I go Rio -> Madrid -> London -> Mumbai. Oh well, I'll have some time to catch up on everything I will have neglected while traveling.

Surprise #2: I still have a pay for taxes on the ticket? Over $700?! No one told me that! But I should've expected it hah.