Episode 02: Decide Where You Will Travel Before Applying to Travel Credit Cards

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining in again. 

In this episode I want to first go over how to decide which travel credit cards to get based on your personal travel destination of choice. Because even before you apply to credit cards or redeem travel points, you have to know where you want to go.  

One strategy to begin is to compile your wish-list of places that you want to go around the world. What I like to do is I like to find a map. If you don't have a map, then simply print one out. It can be a map of the entire world or perhaps a continent or region or even a country that you want to go to.  

For example, when I was planning my around the world trip, I printed out a world map. I then printed out multiple copies of the map because I had to keep changing my desired routes. 

I'd start from where I am living, in my case, the starting point was in Hawaii for me. Then from there, I decided where in that approximate vicinity of the Pacific Ocean I wanted to go. I decided that traveling westward was probably a preferable choice. One of the reasons why I decided to choose the westward journey is because it's easier on your body to adjust to the different time zones if you go west.  

For some weird reason, traveling east especially on red eye flights just really messes up my sleeping clock schedule. So I really thought, if I'm going to 13-14 different countries around the world that I wanted to maximize my body sleeping schedule and not feel like I was a complete zombie. 

I decided upon going westward. I was thinking of traveling to either the South Pacific region or East Asia. I narrowed it down to East Asia because, there's a lot of credit card points that can easily get you to places like Japan and China, I’ll explain this process in later episode. As well there's actually a lot of credit card points that easily can get you to New Zealand and Australia.  

That's pretty much how I started out with how I was planning my round the world journey, and I kind of just listed countries on my wish list first and then I started plotting the points thinking strategically, okay … would it be possible to go on these different routes with points that I need to have.  
 

1. My first step is listing out the countries I was interested.
   
2. Followed by that then I would list of specific cities or towns that I thought would interest me. Remember, create these lists of countries and cities based on your own personal interests. Be sure to have some idea of the country that you're interested in, or perhaps you were in high school and college and learned the local language and you want to practice it there.
   
   You can base your wish-lists off special activities or topics. For me, I love surfing and so a lot of the places that I was choosing I wanted to make sure that it was near a beach and had surf. For other people it could be food, perhaps you're travelling around the world to eat local cuisine.  

Just create a wish-list.  

Break it down like I said in terms of continent, regions, then countries and then cities and towns and then just keep that list out. Then it will really help you be able to fine tune point-to-point routes when you decide to figure out how you're going to redeem these points. So for those that are looking to do the round of world trips. After you have that list of countries and cities and towns what I like to do is then start connecting the dots. 

Other things you want to keep in mind to is the seasons and local weather. When I was doing my around the world trip planning, I was starting my journey in January, the northern hemisphere is in cold winter, and in the southern hemisphere it's their summer. 

I positioned the country visits so that I would at least get to them when they are warm. I unfortunately didn't luck out when I was in London and central U.K. this past April because it was still cold when I was there, but luckily the people along the journey that I met where nice and friendly. And they had jackets that they could let me borrow. But that's just one aspect of the joy of doing all this travel planning.  

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Let me know where you want to visit around the world. I love to know that. 

Just comment and let me know if you guys have any questions that you want me to address. 

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If you missed, Episode 01: Introduction to Travel Hacking with Hustle to Paradise

Next, Episode 03: Difference Between Airline-Branded and Bank-Branded Travel Credit Cards

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