When I first realized that I was going to be doing more traveling, I decided to educate myself about something people on the internet call “travel hacking”. Travel hacking is about taking advantage of airline miles, credit card points, and other promotions to travel for free or very cheaply. There is a lot of stuff written about travel hacking and you can find it pretty easy with some simple google searches. I’m not trying to reproduce those materials here, but I do want to summarize the highlights to give you an idea of what to search for and learn about.
Sign up for airline frequent flier miles accounts and try to consolidate most of your flights on one airline or airline alliance. This means that traveling can earn you more traveling.
Sign up for a rewards credit card that earns points that can be redeemed for airline miles. The best rewards program is Chase Ultimate Rewards. The best cards are the Chase Sapphire cards, specifically the Chase Sapphire Preferred or the Chase Sapphire Reserved if you have a higher credit score. Every time you spend money using these cards you get points that can later be redeemed for travel. This can get you free flights over time but it usually takes awhile to spend enough money to get the points needed for a free ticket. To get free flights more quickly you have to use other strategies such as…
The main method of getting free travel is by signing up for a credit card that has a promotion which will give you a lot of points (typically anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000) if you spend a certain amount of money on the card in the first few months. If you can do that without spending money you wouldn’t otherwise have spent, then the points you get are completely free. Some people take this to the extreme and apply for multiple credit cards several times a year. This can take a lot of work and hurt your credit score if you don’t know what you are doing, so I prefer to get one or two good cards and stick with those.
The second big method of getting free travel is by strategically flying on flights that are likely to be overbooked. When this happens the airline will offer vouchers to passengers who volunteer to be bumped and take a later flight. These vouchers can get as high as $400 - $600 which is another free flight right there. The good thing about this is that you still get frequent flier miles for tickets bought with these vouchers. So it’s free money that also gives you free miles. I don’t know much about how to find flights that are likely to be overbooked, but I plan to learn more about this in the future.
This is where travel hacking gets really good for tango dancers. If you’re booking a flight to some city (for any reason, tango or otherwise), you may be able to do a stopover for a few days at little to no extra cost for the flight. This works best if you already had to fly through the city to get to where you were going. For instance, if you’re going to Rome and flying Lufthansa, then you will probably have to change planes in Frankfurt or Munich. If you’re flying Turkish Airlines, then you will change planes in Istanbul. So why not stop there for a few days and dance in another city?
These are a few of the techniques that I have used to do more travel for less money and maximize the amount of dancing I can do along the way. If you have other suggestions, email me. I’d love to hear them!