Episode 01: Introduction to Travel Hacking with Hustle to Paradise

Aloha everyone. Thanks for joining in. 

I'm Harrison, an avid world traveler based out of Hawaii, and travel hacker who seeks to maximize the most out of credit card point accumulation and airline redemptions to see the world at low cost.

In this episode I'm going to go over the high level thought process behind how you can also plan your round the world trip, even if you don't have to think that big, or as simple as redeeming points to get a near close free flight. This is the first of many episodes that will be explaining how you can also accumulate and redeem points for cheap or luxurious travel.

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Quick Note on Travel Hacking

I actually got a couple questions from some of my international readers on if these Travel Hacking Strategies would work for them, and honestly that’s a great question and I’m glad that I can address it right now. 

The thing is that, a lot of these tactics only work for American citizens. So if you have a social security number and you are in the US then you are in for luck. And that’s the crazy thing is that a lot of Americans don’t even realize that they have all these credit card choices that the rest of the world doesn’t have. 

So yes, unfortunately, to my national readers, this travel hacking tactics may not work as well for you so it’s just not as many travel credit card choices in your respective countries. 

I do believe Canada has some decent ones, Australia may have some as well, and a friend of mine in the UAE had applied to a local credit card there and got some points, but again all these strategies and tactics and credit cards that I am mentioning are mostly strictly for US based citizen. 

So, sorry to be the bearer of bad news for all you guys who are international and I wish the rest of world could enjoy the same thing, but for now, the US travel credit card setup works best for Americans citizens.

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Who doesn't like to travel? 

Pretty much everyone that I know always likes travel and what better way to do it than to also do it for cheap. So my credentials on this basically this past 2016 I travelled around the world for four months. 

I accumulated half a million points and redeemed. 

To be exact three hundred 384,250 of those points. For a total of just paying taxes and fees at $1,016.80 and during that time frame I flew 40, 541 miles which totaled to about 90 hours or around 3.75 days. And I flew with ten airlines across three airline alliances. Fourteen of those were long haul flights of more than four hours and nine of them were at two hours or less.

I flew with eleven different aircrafts, among them is A380-800 and the Boeing 787 were my favorite ones. Eight of those were flights in coach and then fifteen of those flights were in business and in first class. 

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So by now you're probably wondering how did I do that? 

And you know what I was also in your shoes just five years ago. I just graduated from college. The economy was terrible and I first read up on a book actually. A book by Chris Guillebeau called “The Art of Non-Conformity” talked about how his goal was to travel every country in the world. Now that’s a lofty goal. Mine was nowhere near as crazy as his, but at that time I always had dreamed of traveling and really wanted to see more parts of the world. But coming out of graduating from college and unemployed didn't really have that much fun sitting around being back at home in my parents' place in New Jersey.

So as I looked around I realized all these people were doing this thing called “Travel Hacking”. Now the term travel hacking just basically explains the process of accumulating airline points via credit card application methods, then spending money on those credit cards to get to the spending minimum to get the bonus points, and then once you get the points then there's the whole process of figuring out how to redeem them on respective airlines. 

So basically in the simplest form there's just two parts to it. The first part is applying to the credit cards and getting the bonus points attached to those credit cards, and then the second part is redeeming them on respective airlines. It’s as simple as that and that's basically what travel hacking is. 

But when we get into the finer details, there's actually a lot of different techniques that can be used so it can get a little bit more complicated. But if you are new then do not get overwhelmed by all the different details, airline, airline rules, credit card rules. Just take it one at a time. 

So in subsequent episodes I will basically go over step by step how I went about kind of approaching my around the world trip and reaching the point of being able to accumulate all of the half million points and then being able to redeem those points to the best of my ability to go around the world to these you know thirteen different countries.

Basically on my travels I went from Hawaii flew through Japan to Taiwan to Hong Kong to Brisbane in the Gold Coast to Sydney to Singapore, Bali, southern Thailand, Bangkok Thailand, Amman Jordan, Athens Greece to south central United Kingdom London to Minorca and Spain then Barcelona, Dubai, to New York and then back to Hawaii. 

And amazingly the trip basically went as planned with a few flights that might have been canceled, that got rescheduled or was cancelled for mechanical errors, but for the most part all my flights did leave on time. Unbelievably! 

So it was such an amazing trip and I'll definitely tell you guys more about how I planned it all in the next episodes.

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- What are your wishlist locations around the world?

- Do you have immediate burning questions you want to ask about travel hacking?

Comment below and let me know :)

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Follow me @hustletoparadise to stay up to date on future episodes of Travel Hacking with Hustle to Paradise.

(Introduction photo courtesy of Vincent Versluis found on Unsplash)