Frequent Miler on the Air - Top Travel Hacks Learned from Past Frequent Miler Challenges | Ep167 | 9-10-22

Episode Date: September 10, 2022

From dirt-cheap awards to Hawaii to nearly-free airport parking and the best free airport tours worldwide, this week we discuss the top travel hacks learned from past frequent miler challenges as we prepare to set off on our latest such challenge. 3:00 Giant Mailbag 8:30 3 Cards 3 Continents 3 Updates https://frequentmiler.com/frequent-milers-2022-team-challenge-3-cards-3-continents/ 20:22 Main Event: Top travel hacks learned from past Frequent Miler challenges 20:33: 7.5K miles to Hawaii https://frequentmiler.com/7-5k-each-way-to-hawaii-with-turkish-miles-and-smiles/ 25:13 United Excursionist Perk https://frequentmiler.com/maximizing-and-understanding-united-excursionist-perks/ 31:16 Czech Airways from Prague to Seoul 32:14 Hong Kong to London for 12.5K miles 35:00 Free airport tours and hotels https://frequentmiler.com/the-best-stopover-deals-worldwide/ 37:50 Trip to New York for $19 per day / cheap airport parking https://frequentmiler.com/my-19-new-york-city-challenge/ 41:40 Manual bookings through Avianca LifeMiles https://travellingtheworld.boardingarea.com/2016/09/book-lifemiles-awards-not-available-online/ https://frequentmiler.com/when-lifemiles-com-shows-no-availability-try-a-manual-booking/

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event, Frequent Miler on the Air starts now. Today's main event, top travel hacks learned from past Frequent Miler challenges. We are about to take off on our latest frequent miler challenge, three cards, three continents. In fact, by the time the show drops, Nick is going to be in the air. So I'm going to be a few days later and Stephen's going to be in between the two of us when we actually take off. But wow, we're going to at least three continents each, building as amazing of a trip as we can with the welcome bonuses from three different cards. That's our Three Cards Three

Continents Challenge. If you're not already following us on Instagram, look for Frequent Miler on Instagram and follow us because that's where you'll be able to really keep up to date, watch our stories unfold of our trips. And they're going to be Epic. I believe so. I think so. I'm excited. And like Greg said, that's going to be the best place to follow along because you'll see what's happening. And it's just easier to tell a travel story with videos and pictures and the Instagram stories is going to be the way to do that. So follow us on Instagram, check out the Instagram stories. If you're listening to this, when it publishes on Saturday morning, September

10th, then check out our Instagram stories right now, pause the show, go take a look and see what I'm doing. Exactly. Exactly. And follow frequent miler, as we as we said. If you're a blog reader, you will get daily updates in the blog about what we're doing, but it just won't be the same as following along in the stories on Instagram. So I do really recommend doing that. I'm starting to feel a little bit horse here, which is ironic because Nick is just getting over extreme horsiness. Yes, extreme. I would nay, except I can't make a sound that high right now. I tried to, and it was like, nothing came out. I was like, yeah, that's about all I got on that right now. So yeah, a poorly timed bout of laryngitis on my end.

So a couple of horse days for me, but I'm hanging in there doing the best I can. I know I sound a little different, but it's me. I'm here. And somehow I've infected Greg through the airwaves. Right. It was from our team meeting a couple of days ago where Nick came on sounding like the godfather the entire time. Right. I sounded a little bit more like this the other day. And, you know, the guys, you know, they were, they were in trouble because I, you know, I was there. All right. Enough of that. Nick was stroking a cat in his lap the entire time. Okay. All right. So that brings us to, I think this week's giant mailbag.

Giant mailbag time. That's right. Thanks for getting us back on track here. I do the best I can. I try to get us on track around here. Today's giant mail comes via email from Lloyd. He sent me a link to an interesting graphic of the air routes of the world. And he says, it's remarkably top-heavy.

So it was just a visual showing all the air routes. And he says, it was remarkably top-heavy, which got me thinking about whether it is possible to book a round-the-world trip entirely with miles and entirely in the Southern Hemisphere. So again, what he meant by top heavy is most flights around the world are in the Northern Hemisphere or around the equator. And there's very little south of the equator that at least that spans continents. And he says, so his idea of could you do it entirely in the Southern Hemisphere around the world trip? Not now, apparently. I see Qantas will beation, I now know one unusual and unique trip. The frequent miler contestants won't be taking in the three cards, three continents challenge.

And I brought this up because Lloyd's absolutely right. Um, you know, I'm doing that a and a round the world award and it's cheaper, the fewer miles you actually fly. And so one way of flying fewer miles when going around the world is to stick close to one of the poles, right? Like if you imagine a South Pole, you know, and you were like actually right there, you could walk around it and you'd go like about, you know, a yard. And you would circle the know, a yard, right? And you would circle the world in a yard. But, you know, more realistic, if you could somehow fly directly from South Africa to Australia, you know, and around that way, then you could do theoretically around the world in very few miles. The problem is there just are not many flights, even during normal times. And a lot of them that used to be there are not currently available for various reasons. So yeah, I'm not going to be doing that as much as I would have loved to. So you will see me flying more on the Northern Hemisphere than on the Southern.

And even then, I couldn't really stick to very close to the North Pole, also because of a lack of flights and award availability. So I'm going to be a little closer to the equator than is optimal for building a short round the world flight. But yeah, some clues like that and just what's possible makes you realize a little bit about what we're doing or what we're not doing. Yeah. And I think that the point about, excuse me, the point about there being not great connectivity

between while he was mentioning between South America and Africa, which is a true point, but that's not the only place. It's really hard to get between South America and anywhere other than North America. Right. I mean, there are very few, there's a couple of Europe and that's basically, and I guess there's the one you go through, Easter Island to get somewhere out to. Exactly, La Tombe, I think.

Yeah, exactly, La Tombe. So I think that one ends up in Australia or something, right? But there's very, very few options, though, to get anywhere else. I don't think there are any other flights to Asia. So yeah, South America is a tough one if you're not going from north america and so of course for the purposes of the trip that would mean potentially burning like the miles for a round trip flight to south america if you wanted to include that as a continent uh or perhaps using airline incidental credits that would be another way to potentially get there if you had those

airline incidental credits and they would cover cheap flights on airlines that fly to South America. Yeah, that is possible. So both Nick and Stephen have platinum cards in their three-card array, and both of those have $200 airline incidental fee credits. As we published this week, the post on what works to get those credits to be reimbursed. It is possible, whether directly or indirectly, to get airfare reimbursed in many situations. So it's certainly possible to do something like that. But I mean, $200 round trip, that'd be pretty tough to find, I think. But if you found it, great. I can't wait to see what you're doing there. We'll see. I'm not saying that I am, but it's certainly something that I spent some time digging into. Anyway, though, that aside, I think that brings us, speaking of all of this three-card stuff, to three cards, three continents, three updates. So what are our final updates before we take off on the trip?

Or I guess it's a little late for activities that we have for this challenge. We just, we, we just say everything that's solely travel is what's limited, you know, what has to be accounted for in our three cards, uh, welcome bonus, like budget. Um, but activities we can just spend kind of whatever and just account for it and we'll report those amounts later. So he had originally accounted for both of these flights under his activity budget, but he realized that only one of these two flights were really the activity itself and one was like, I guess, getting somewhere. So now he's switched that so that one of the two is now coming out of his travel budget, but only 25 bucks.

So what kind of flight is this? I don't understand. I mean, like it's got to be Ryanair or something, right? I mean, like, you know, where can you get for $25 in an airplane? You know, like, you know, I say that and I know that down in, I was just recently in Myrtle Beach and they do these helicopter tours there and it's like $25 for a 10 minute helicopter ride. So that means one of them is an activity which would have to be a sightseeing flight or something along those lines, which is not Ryanair's forte as far as I know. No, no. I don't believe so. No.

Not many people get off a Ryanair flight. I mean, there might be some sights to see, but it's not a sightseeing flight. Yes, that's correct. Correct. Correct. All right. I mean, there might be some sites to see, but it's not a sightseeing flight. Yes, that's correct. Correct. Correct. All right. So yeah, I don't know what he's doing. I'll be, I'll be curious to see. So for me, my update is actually not related to travel itself, but rather to not only my poorly timed laryngitis, but my poorly timed laptop malfunction. So my main laptop that I use hours and hours every day, the display stopped working about a week ago, a week and a half ago, maybe, I don't know. And so I was in a crunch because I took it to a bunch of places to see if I could get it fixed. And nobody was able to be able to get a part to get it fixed. And then I was nervous that if they

got the part, what if this happens again? Because the problem with the laptop is that the screen just isn't working. It was going completely blank. And so I can use it plugged into a monitor. So it's fine at home, but that's obviously going to be a problem if I'm on the trip and I'm trying to write posts and the screen doesn't work. So I'm not going to carry a monitor with me. So I needed to get a replacement laptop. So I did a bunch of shopping around. I thought I would use my Dell credits. I was really hoping we've written about how you can buy Xbox gift cards, Xbox live gift cards at dell.com and then load those to your Microsoft account and buy it from Microsoft.

And so that's what I initially had in mind, but Dell keeps canceling my orders. I got a few gift card orders in and now I just can't seem to get a gift card order in for anything. So, so yeah, I, so I wasn't going to be able to go that route. So I thought, okay, well, I guess I'm going to have to buy a Dell then. And cause we have a few business platinum cards in my household. And then those, those Amex offers that are out and you can split payment over three payment types at Dell. So that means a pretty decent discount. If I use two business platinum cards or three business platinum cards, which we happen to have in my household, that's $600 off of a computer basically. So I

initially intended to do that, but shopped around for a while and decided that Dell just didn't have what I wanted. And so I ended up with an Asus ZenBook. We'll see how it goes. I bought from Costco, specifically because Costco has a 90-day return policy. And I decided to downsize a little and go with a slightly smaller, lighter, more portable laptop because at home,

I do usually use it with a monitor. So I figured the portability would probably come in handy. I'm sure that it's gonna be handy on this trip. And I wanted something with a bright enough screen that I can see it outside. So I got something with a really bright screen also with an OLED screen. And so we'll see. And the nice thing about buying it from Costco is that if I decide that the screen is just a little bit too small or I can't handle the fact that it doesn't have a number pad to

the right, it does kind of have one built into the mouse pad. It's a really weird innovation Asus has on this where the mouse pad will light up and become a number pad. So yeah, which is neat, but it's a little different because you don't feel the button pushing down. So we'll see. Cause I use the number pad a lot. We'll see whether or not I like it, but the good news is I have 90 days to decide. And if I don't like it, then that'll give me plenty of time to shop around for the deal that I do want. So, so we'll see. So far, I'm really happy. Screen is amazing on this Asus 14-inch OLED. It's terrific. So we'll see how it goes with everything else. Yeah. Yeah. Now I've been told in the past that it's pronounced something like Asus, but you know, it might be one of those like Qatar type of things where

you could say it however you want. I don't know. Yeah. That's probably somewhat of a bad habit of mine, but yes, because I think I've heard people pronounce it Asus before. And I just probably always stuck with what I had read the first time I saw it. So my Asus Zen book, I'm pretty excited about. We'll see how it edits the show. That's another concern of mine because it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card. And so I'm not sure how that's going to do with editing this show, but we'll see how long it takes to do and go from there. Yeah, that'll be very interesting. All right. So my update is sort of about how nervous I guess I am leading up to my departure. So here's what's happening is I need to get, and I have scheduled a COVID test for next

Tuesday morning, and I need to test negative on that. Meanwhile, on Tuesday of this week, my son son who's an aspiring filmmaker he was off in north carolina shooting a a short film with a a crew of seven people and he was headed back home uh and and uh text us hey by the way i tested positive for COVID this morning. I'm coming home. Oh, no. So he's been quarantined in his room. And anytime he passes through the main house, he wears a mask and we wear masks. And we have our air filtration system kicked up to high, like, like nonstop

24 hours and keep the windows open as much as we can, all that kind of stuff. But it's still a little scary. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, so that kind of scared me in general, not, not, I'm not actually scared about getting COVID like I've had it before. And at least for me, it was, it was mild.

It felt like having a cold. And, and so that doesn't scare me. But what does scare me is anything that could throw off this trip that's coming up. So it's kind of terrifying. And I've, at least for the days leading up to this, have gone back to things like wearing a mask if I go inside a store. Because I had stopped doing that for months now. And it feels weird

to do that again. But I think being cautious makes a lot of sense in these days leading up. So hopefully I will test negative. We'll see. It sure does. And it's something that had been on my mind quite a bit also. And obviously I sound terrible right now and I've tested multiple times for COVID to make sure that I don't have it. And I'll test again today just to make sure before I take off my trip tomorrow. But anyway, I had the same exact thought this year that I hadn't been wearing a mask in stores and things like that. And I was nervous in this last week about attending events specifically for any kind of exposure I might get, because like you said, it would just totally throw off the trip. And of course, I've been

hoarse like this for a couple of days. I'm thinking to myself that I'm going to get to an immigration desk sounding like this, and that's going to buy me a very express ticket to more screening and testing if I still sound this bad. So I'm hoping that my voice will be a little bit better tomorrow than it was today, because today it's a lot better than it was yesterday. So, you know, each day, hopefully it'll get a little bit better and we'll go from there. You have a test for your first flight. Do you have to take any more tests for your destination? No, actually the test actually isn't for my first flight. It's for a later flight. I had to do some tricky calendar math because I had to get the test a certain number of hours before departure to this destination that requires

it. And since I'll have changed time zones a couple of times in between there, it was just a little complicated to figure out, well, when could I get this test where it's convenient to get it and still be within that window? So I figured that out and it should be good. I guess if I do test positive, but it's a false positive or something, I would have time, I think, at my next stop to take another test and hope it changes. So we'll see. Meanwhile, what I did do on Wednesday is I went and got another booster shot, which they have these new boosters out that were designed based on the Omicron variant. And so they should offer more protection theoretically. And so the trick for me

is, will it really kick in in time to prevent me from getting COVID when I get tested. It'll definitely protect me during the trip. It'll protect me before the trip, which is when I'm even more concerned about it, we'll see. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely something that I've been nervous about. Not forgetting COVID itself as much, like you said, for the way that it would derail the trip, especially a complicated trip with a lot of flights, you know, quarantining in one place for a few days will like kill the rest of the trip. So, you know, it'd mess everything up. So, um, so I'm, I'm very hopeful that we're all okay and healthy and stay that way because, uh, you know, that, that would certainly ruin things, uh, you know, if we, if we had to

totally replan. So at the last minute, I don't even know what I would do. So I'm hopeful for you and for me and for Steven that we're all okay. I also had a booster. I did not get the new Omicron booster, but I had a booster a couple of weeks ago, my second one, just trying to be as proactive as I can because I don't want to get derailed during this trip. Right, right. No, that should definitely help. It's not the new one. All right. So because Nick has to run off to the airport like any moment now, we're going to skip our usual segment.

So we're not going to do the what crazy thing. We're not going to do the mattress running the numbers. We're not going to do awards we booked this week. So we're going to jump right into the main event now. And that is the top travel hacks learned from past frequent miler challenges. All right. So the first one up that we're going to talk about today is one that I'm always excited to talk about. And that is the ability to book United economy class flights to Hawaii for only 7,500 miles each way from practically anywhere in North America that United flies. So the sweet spot here was discovered during our 40K to far

away challenge. That was a challenge we did in 2019, I think, right? Where we each took 40,000 transferable points and $400 to try to plan the most incredible trip that we could one way. And so the way I kicked my trip off was flying from Washington, DC to Honolulu, Hawaii via San Francisco, I think. And so that cost me 7,500 miles one way to fly in United. The sweet spot here is Turkish Airlines, Turkish Miles and Smiles charges just 7,500 miles each way in economy class for domestic Star Alliance awards. So awards within a single country. And obviously, the United States is a very large country. So it's not only flights to Hawaii, but flights anywhere within the United States, including to and from Alaska, but certainly transcon flights and flights anywhere within the US where United has saver availability are 7,500 miles an economy or 12,500 miles in business class. United is very stingy with releasing business class. So don't get too excited about that one. Although I did at some point in 2020 book a trip to Hawaii, I found three seats on the nonstop from Newark to Honolulu for 12,500 miles

each way. I had to cancel that trip, unfortunately, but it maybe is possible if you continue to hunt around. More likely, though, is the United Economy availability is fairly open. The challenge here is booking it. It's not an easy one to book because Turkish's website stinks. They show some flights sometimes, but definitely not all the flights a lot of the time. And so you'll probably not, I mean, if you're lucky, you'll find what you want on the website, but otherwise you'll be stuck either having to call, which is a very frustrating exercise because you could call a hundred agents and you may find two that know how to book this or find it or see the availability. Or the better method is via email. So you'll have to email a ticket office, which means you'll probably have to email about a dozen

different ticket offices to be sure that somebody responds to you because many of them won't. And hopefully they'll help you be able to get it booked. Once you get it put on hold, by the way, I've mentioned this before, but I'm going to mention it again because I think it's worth mentioning when we talk about the sweet spot. Once the ticket office puts it on hold via email, you can call to pay for the ticket, to pay the taxes over the phone. The email ticket office will ask you to send a copy of your ID and a picture of the front and back of your credit card and a blood sample and your first point of birth certificate or something like that. And you don't have to do all that. Just call the 800 number and give them the reference number

and ticket it. But that was a really incredible sweet spot that we discovered because we had to find something cool. I had 40,000 city thank you points and I had to figure out how can I get really far with these thank you points. I don't know anything about this Turkish Airlines program. And I just stumbled on something great because they had made a change in their award chart. So of course, Turkish is a transfer partner of Citi, Capital One and Built. Yeah. Yeah. That one hack sort of went down as like one of the best finds ever. And even despite how hard it is to book, well, actually maybe because of it, it's still around this, this, this, you know, capability. But, you know, despite how hard it is, we've, we've heard from lots of readers who've booked

them. Some readers have said, you know, I'm on my fourth trip this year kind of thing, you know, using this trip. Yeah. There's one writer who I think he told me via email, he said, my goal is to book so many trips to Hawaii with this that my family finally says, you know what, we're sick of Hawaii. We don't want to go anymore. And so I think like in the space of a year and a half, they've done like five trips. And so, you know, I mean, that's, that's incredible. That's a lot of fun. And it's possible because those points are relatively easy to get, especially in such small quantity. You're talking 15,000 round trip.

And that's, that's awesome. If you can find the availability. And if you're somewhere where you're not in a major market, where you're in a small market, United still often has saver availability in economy class. And so that makes it really sweet because you can leave from your small airport and not have to book a positioning flight in a lot of cases. Right, right. That's fantastic. All right. The next great hack, I can't really take credit for it, but I'll explain it a little bit, is using the United Excursionist perk with this capability, it's possible to fly across any United region

worldwide for only 10,000 miles. And I can't really get into the full details of how this works, but first let me give credit where it's due. I first read about the possibility of this hack from Travel is Free, which is a blog that's no longer in existence or is no longer being published actively, written by Drew, who is the husband of Kerry, who is on our team. Anyway, so he had written about how this is possible a while ago. I don't think he had done it. I don't know of anyone personally who had done it until I used this trick for the 40K to far away challenge. And basically the excursionist perk in general, the idea behind it is it lets you book a round trip award flight to a different region from where you're

starting and then get a free flight at that different region, basically. That's the idea behind it. So like, for example, if you wanted to fly round trip from the US to Europe, you could fly into, let's say, Paris, fly home from, let's say, Frankfurt, and the flight in between from Paris to Frankfurt would be free because of this excursionist perk. That's the idea. But it turns out this is sort of very, very hackable to where your initial flight could be a tiny little 45 minute flight from Washington to West Virginia. And then you could get a free flight across the entire length of Africa, which is what I did. And you'd later have a throwaway flight. And since United Airlines award flights start at only 5,000 points each, you could set up a flight before your free flight and a flight after your free flight

that each costs 5,000 points. And that lets you fly the length of, for example, Africa or Europe, those are the two biggest zones where it makes sense to do this for only a total of 10,000 points because of how you do it. So check out the blog for details about that because this is way too hard to explain on the podcast. It is, but I have to dig into a small piece of it with you now because this came up actually, I did an interview on Award Travel 101 this week and we talked about a bunch of different things. But there was a question that came up. And when I asked the question, I'm sure a light bulb's going to go off, but then I'm going to have two more questions that go with it. And so there was a question about what do I think there is to look out for if this rumored partnership between United Airlines and Emirates comes to fruition?

And my first thought was, oh, I wonder if there's a way to leverage the excursionist perk into some good deals with that, if that happens. And so then of course I thought, well, with the excursionist perk, the way it works is your free flight is in the same class of service as whatever your first flight is. And so I wondered to myself, could you book a business class flight on United if it's any cheaper than 25K or even if it's 25K? Could you book a business class flight on United and then leverage that with a one-way Emirates award that's free? the problem there is that as Greg just explained, the way the excursion is per perk worked. And I'm going to use that past tense intentionally here was that your free flight had to be entirely within a single region from the award chart. Now, what I don't know now is since there's no longer an award chart is where do you get those region definitions except for the frequent miler post

that has the regions laid out and have they changed at all? Yeah. I mean, as far as I know, what they call zones or zone definitions were on a separate page entirely from the word chart anyway. So I assume that's still there. And one thing that I think people should realize is that the, you know, I mentioned that Africa and Europe are the biggest zones. You would think that things like Asia would be the biggest zones, biggest zone, or maybe, maybe the South Pacific, but the way they have them set up, like they have like maybe four different zones for different parts of Asia. And so it doesn't end up being as big as you would think there. And then Emirates, I mean- Well, they have some fifth freedom routes. So I was going to say, maybe if they had a fifth freedom route entirely within a zone, that might work. I just don't, off the top of my head,

I can't think of any. Here's the other one that I wondered about, and maybe you know, but I'm going to guess you might not, is what about Dubai and the Maldives? Would they be in a single zone for that, or would the Maldives be in a different India sort of a zone? I would assume that, yeah, that's a great question. I think that Maldives is in the India, whatever part of Asia that they put India in, which might be its own thing. Maldives might be there, but that's worth checking out for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there might be some ways to, to leverage that possibly anyway, if that partnership comes to fruition here as, as is rumored on September 14th. So that's something

to keep an eye out on. If you, you If you have some United miles and you go and you read Greg's post about the excursionist perk and you're like, oh, wow, you wrap your mind around it because it is a little complex, then maybe there's a way to leverage that with Emirates. Okay. Next up, book check airways, life, lab, business class from Prague to Seoul. Now, I know you have this on the list and I don't remember it necessarily being a discovery from a challenge, but it's certainly something I wanted to do on the 40K to far away challenge because it's something that I had read about forever. And the reason is Czech Airways partners with Etihad and Etihad has an individual award chart for each of their partners. And so there are some weird sweet

spots in those various partner award charts. And one of them was this flight on check airways from Prague to Seoul, which is obviously quite a long distance. And they only charged, I think it was 2000 or 26,500 ish miles, 27,000 miles, something like that for a business class ticket all the way from Prague to Seoul, lie flat seats. It was a plane that used to be owned by Korean airlines that I think they had leased to check lie flat seats. It was a plane that used to be owned by Korean Airlines that I think they had leased to Czech Airways. So that was a great sweet spot. Yeah, yeah.

Another one that we didn't actually do is the ability to fly Virgin Atlantic from Hong Kong to London for only 12,500 miles and about $42 in taxes. So Virgin Atlantic tends to have very, very low award prices for their economy and premium economy flights, but they usually charge a lot in taxes and fees. And so this particular one, apparently, like Hong Kong doesn't allow the fuel surcharges to be tacked on. And so flying, as long as you're originating in Hong Kong, flying Virgin Atlantic to London, the tax and fees are almost non-existent and only $12,500 for economy. And it's something like 22,000 for premium economy. I mean, it's just a dirt cheap flight to go really, really far. Yeah, that is an excellent one.

And you might hear now that I've got a throat lozenge in. So I apologize if you hear that rock around in my mouth there. And if you saw my face freeze for a minute, that's because I was coughing. Something got caught caught my throat there. So a great sweet spot, though. That one, I think, is really interesting for anybody who is trying to piece together a long trip and they're fine with flying an economy class. You just want to go as far as you can on as few miles as possible. I think that'd be great.

Have you ever flown Virgin Atlantic before, Greg? It's funny. No, I haven't. I haven't once flown Virgin Atlantic. They used? It's funny. No, I haven't. I haven't once flown Virgin Atlantic. They used to fly right out of Detroit too. It's just that the flight times to London were on the Virgin Atlantic flights were very awkward for those based in the US, but they were, I think, designed for those based on UK time.

And so I always ended up flying Delta instead. And now they've left Detroit for quite a few years ago now. So I haven't had any good opportunities. I certainly want to. I mean, they get good reviews. People like flying them. So why have you not flown them apart from the fact that they're not in Detroit. Well, I mean, yeah, just that, that, that it's just never come up that they were a convenient carrier for a flight that I wanted to go on and not just for the heck of flying them. Yeah. Well, and between the high fees on their award tickets and then, yeah, they just haven't had a convenient flight for me.

So I haven't, I haven't been on them yet either yeah yeah um all right uh so another thing that again it's not so much a discovery from the 40k to far away trip but but during uh the planning for that, I compiled a page that lists all of the free hotels and tours that are available during stopovers at various airports and countries around the world. So a lot of things like Turkey is famous for, if you fly Turkish, there's an opportunity to get up to two nights in a hotel for free or get a free tour of Istanbul when flying through there. And so things like that, there's a lot of things like that all around the world, compiled a whole bunch of them. I haven't yet done any of them. Have you done any? I have not. I intend to try to see about them a little bit during the trip. But let me ask you, do you have any intentions to do any of them? You don't have to share which ones during this trip? Yeah. No, I don't. And in fact, I looked into a little bit the Turkish one, the hotels, and it was extremely confusing

because there's multiple pages on Turkish's website that talk about it. And one of them has all kinds of rules, including it has to be a round trip flight and you have to be departing and arriving at, it has a list of countries that are valid as your starting points and ending points. And I wasn't at all sure that my weird round the world trip thing would qualify. And I emailed them to ask and never heard anything back. But in truth, I didn't really need it because I have, if you remember, five free nights, Marriott nights, and also I have my city thank you points. So I'm able to book choice hotels very cheaply. And so it was more like, oh, this would be cool to do than something necessary for my

trip. So I did not do that, but I would have loved to have proven that if it was easy enough to figure out. Right. And when you mentioned the rules, one of the other rules that I saw was that it had to be on Turkish Airlines ticket stock, which wasn't mentioned everywhere on every page, but I saw it on one of the pages. So yeah, it's something I had looked into also. So we'll see, especially now during the current times, I'm not sure which ones are still available out of the various free tours. So it'll be interesting.

I'm interested in looking into and finding what else there is and seeing which of the things that exist that you wrote about that are easily available still. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. All right. The next one we have on the list, it goes way, way back. One of the first challenges I ever did before there was anyone else working on the Frequent Miler team at all is I challenged myself to see if I could do a trip to New York City for $19 a day. And to be clear, I was allowing myself to use as many points and miles as I wanted to use, as long as they weren't used for cash equivalent purposes. In my mind, it was fine to use what I did, Hilton points to stay at a hotel, but it wouldn't have been fine to, let's say, cash out Chase points in order to pay for things and not count that in the budget.

So, the hardest part of doing New York City for $19 a day in those constraints was not food, because New York City, despite being very expensive food wise it also has things like one dollar pizza slices and the pizza slices are like bigger than my house and you know you can eat really cheaply in new york um that wasn't an issue um the hardest thing was i was including the uh getting to the airport and everything. And so where was I going to park my car? You know, the Detroit airport, even if I do off airport parking, it's something like $11 a day. So that would have been the vast majority of my budget right there. What I found and what I used was a off-airport hotel that actually had a parking option for $4 a day. And so I parked there and used their shuttle to get to the airport and back.

And I guess what I want to say about this is that it's not so much that exact solution that I want to talk about here, but rather that in general, using like near airport hotels as a way to park cheap the hotel, hey, is it okay if I park here during my trip and just leave my car here? Some hotels, especially if they're pretty far off airport, but still have a shuttle and they're not worried about their parking space, would probably be just like, yeah, that's fine. Others have park and fly rates that are often not too much more than the regular rates. So you could look into that as well. Yeah, that's a great point. Well, didn't realize that was going to happen. That's a great point. And I think one of the fun pieces of these challenges is that it pushes us to find those things. Because if you weren't doing a challenge, you just would have parked at the airport, right? Exactly.

For the $11 a day, you'd have been like, oh, whatever, it's easy. You wouldn't have even looked into finding a $4 a day option. But the fun of these challenges is that they push us to look for the $4 a day option and figure out what the best thing is. And so I think that's the advantage of us doing these in general, because when we are pushed to outside of our boundaries, that's when we find this stuff. If I didn't have to plan a big trip with City Thank You Points, I never would have even looked at the Turkish Miles and Smiles website. So same thing with the parking and with some of the things, hopefully, that we'll talk about on the trips that we're going to take. Again, things that I probably wouldn't have considered if I weren't constrained by the parameters of the competition. So it's fun kind of having those. They push us to find new stuff that hopefully

readers will find useful also. Yeah. Yeah. Another one I think is worth talking about is the trick for booking complicated awards through Avianca Life Miles. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I wrote a post a while back about making a manual booking with Avianca Life Miles. And so this also came from our 40K to Far Away Challenge. What I wanted to do was to book a complicated itinerary that had four different segments. And each of the segments showed up on the Avianca Lifemiles website, but they didn't show up together. And so I had found an article written by Dominic from Traveling the World, I think is the name of the blog. I apologize. If not, I'll try to link to it in the show notes. And he had written about making a manual booking. And so essentially you send an

email to support at lifemiles.com and you send them screenshots of the individual flights available on LifeMiles. And then somebody eventually might call you back. And in my case, it was like a week later, somebody called me and I think I missed the call. And I got an email saying that I needed to call to ticket this within 24 hours, or it must have been even less than that. It must've been just a few hours. I feel like I needed to call back to pay for it because they had put it on hold. And so sure enough, it was exactly the price I expected. And so I flew from Brisbane, Australia to Christchurch, New Zealand, to Nelson, New Zealand, to Auckland, New Zealand, and then on to Niue, a little island in the Pacific that's only got two flights in and out each week.

And all of that was one single economy class award. I can't remember. It was like 20,000 miles maybe, or something like that. And so relatively cheap, those flights usually are all economy class. So there is no business class option on those short flights, but it gave me a chance to visit Nelson, New Zealand for a day. And, you know, that of course gave me the chance to ride a bicycle for like 22 miles to nowhere with no food, no water. And you can check all that out if that excites you. And what we wrote about it, but yeah. So I think if you search Unfrequent Miler,

Life Miles manual booking, you'll find the post about that. And that can be useful because there are times when you will find those individual... I mean, Life Miles is notorious for not always showing all of the itineraries, but you may be able to piece together what you need. Yeah. All right. I think that wraps up our show for today. Nice short show before you head off on the, I almost said 40K to far away,

for the Three Cards, Three Continents Challenge. And as we said earlier, it's going to be a few more days before I take off, but wish you good luck. Thank you very much. And good luck to you and Steven. Like we said before, you want to make sure that you're following our Instagram story. And by the way, if you're not yet on our email list, you can go to frequentmiler.com

slash subscribe. Again, that's frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join our email list. But you are definitely going to want to go to Instagram, follow us, take a look at our stories each day. We're going to have stuff. Like we said, I'm already taken off by the time you hear this. And so I would really start looking for a couple of updates today. And then, of course, throughout this whole week, if you're listening to it a little bit later, I can that today will be Saturday, September 10th, but then each day of the week, keep an eye on our Instagram story because each of us will surely have

some interesting updates to follow wherever you're watching this show or listening to it. Leave us some comments, leave us a thumbs up, a like subscribe, enable notifications. We appreciate all of those things and we will see you guys again next week and in our Instagram stories all week long. Bye everybody. appreciate all of those things and we will see you guys again next week and in our instagram stories all week long bye everybody all right