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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tynan
An attitude I’ve adopted and found very helpful in maintaining international friendships is that I always do the work. In other words, I’m the one who has chosen an unconventional lifestyle, so I believe that it’s my responsibility to bear most of the burden of maintaining the friendship.
You only really learn when you’re surprised. Unless you’re surprised, everything is fitting into your existing thought patterns. So to get smarter, you need to get surprised, think in new ways, and deeply understand different perspectives.
Every country has a shared and working philosophy. Dive in and really try to understand it. This is one of the best things you can do for your brain. Stay immersed at least until you feel yourself saying “we” instead of “they”.
The most important thing to do is to book the flight immediately. Don’t check your calendar, don’t see if your friends can go. Just book the flight. Any airline which has at least one flight to the United States (which is most of them), will allow you to cancel within 24 hours of booking, as discussed elsewhere.
As soon as you get one flight booked, start digging in more to find the best dates. Check your schedule, talk to friends, and rebook. Every time you rebook, cancel the previous flight. Or book several different dates and spend the next twenty-four hours figuring out which one to keep. The best deals disappear within an hour, and most good ones are gone within a day. Don’t miss out on going somewhere you’d really like to go because you were a perfectionist and waited too long.
Just when I thought I knew every trick in the flight-booking book, I found a site called http://momondo.com. At first glance it looks like every other run-of-the-mill flight search engine, but the results reveal something different.
The booking pages all look fairly sketchy, but the agencies are legitimate. I’ve booked a bunch of flights through them and have never had any issues. I don’t know how they have such cheap prices, but they often undercut the prices everyone else has by 10-30% for the exact same flights.
It’s always worth including Momondo (the main flight search engine that links to the agencies) in your searches, especially when booking European flights.
There’s an excellent site for finding these flights called http://Skiplagged.com. They were sued by United, but the court found that there was nothing wrong with encouraging people to take only the legs of the flight they needed.
The key to using Southwest is to understand their cancellation policy. You can get a full refund of any flight at any time, including minutes before boarding, for any reason. If you pay with points you will just get the points back, and if you pay with a credit card you’ll get the money back as a credit for future travel.
The problem is that search engines hide long layovers because most people would prefer shorter ones. To get around this, use Google Flights to search and scroll to the bottom. Click the area that says “Show longer or more expensive flights”. Then scroll back up and look and see if there are cheap ones that have good layovers. In general this will show all possible routes with that airline.
If you don’t see anything you like, go to the website of the company which has the cheapest price with a layover that you like. Instead of searching for a one-way or round-trip, search for a multi stop and include the layover city as a stop.
By law, any airline that services the United States must grant you a full refund within 24 hour of booking a flight, as long as the flight is more than a week from the booking date. Some airlines also allow you to cancel within a week, but you need to check your specific airline to make sure.
Holidays are also very inexpensive days to travel. I’m constantly trying to convince my family to delay our observance of Christmas to one day later so that we can all fly in on Christmas, which is often half the price of the day before or after. New Years and July Fourth are also good days to travel.
One key pattern to understand is that a primary driver of flight cost is the number of people who fly that route annually, especially for business travel. This is why it’s usually cheaper to fly from Los Angeles to New York (2500 miles) than it is to fly from Los Angeles to Santa Fe (700 miles).
Las Vegas to New York is an extremely common route, which makes it very inexpensive. Often flights are just $99 each way. New York is the US hub with the most connections to Europe, so flights from New York to Europe are often disproportionately inexpensive. To take advantage of these cheap routes you can book a round trip to New York, and then book another round trip from there to Zurich. Prices constantly change, but at the time of this writing the combined two round trips come in at around $700, while a round trip from Las Vegas comes in at $900. Because there are no direct flights between
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Doing this also grants you some flexibility. You can nest the flights such that your layover is just a few hours, or you could leave a day or two on one or both sides so that you also get a free trip (or two!) to New York. Because you will usually be doing this between cities that are busy, there should be enough flights that you can make just about any schedule you like.
For flights to Europe, check New York, Boston, and Washington. For flights to South America, check Miami and Houston. For flights to Asia, check Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. Make sure that you leave at least 3-4 hours between flights to account for delays and terminal changes. I tend to leave much longer layovers and spend the time...
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These points can be redeemed for flights, but simultaneously dictate the status you have on an airline. If you earn a certain number of points per year, usually around 25,000, you will gain status on the airline for the following year. That status entitles you to seat upgrades, free bags, and a multiplier on points earned, as well as other small perks. The multiplier can be very valuable, as it can reach or exceed 100%.
Most programs charge 25,000 miles to travel round-trip in the United States, and around 65,000 to go to Europe. These numbers do vary, but I mention them as a point of reference.
When looking for a loyalty program, what you should care most about is how many points you will earn for any given flight. A program with a mile-based earning scheme rather than a dollar-based earning scheme will always earn more points over the long run. You should also care about which airlines credit to ...
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As I write this, the best program by far is Alaska Airlines, even if you never actually fly Alaska Airlines. They still credit per mile, even on partner airlines (though often at a discounted rate), and they have a good partnership with American Airlines, which is often the best airline to fly within the US. They also bought Virgin America, which is even better than a partnership, as all flights are credited at the full rate of one point per mile.
In addition to those two strong domestic options, they have a number of good international partners, making it likely that international flights you take can be credited to them.
At their first tier they introduce a 25% mileage bonus, which is standard, but at their second tier they offer 100%, which is much higher than most programs offer in the second tier. That means that you can fly and not only get credited based on mileage, but receive double the mileage you would normally receive. This mak...
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American isn’t the best program out there, but it’s the easiest one to gain status on without doing a ton of flying. And once you get status on it, you can then get another airline (Alaska, for example) to match it for the following year, thus giving you over two years of status for one short outlay of effort. The reason American is easy is because they offer a really cool challenge. You pay $200 to sign up, and if you earn 12,500 qualifying miles within 90 days, you will have Platinum status for the rest of the year. If you do it after June 16th, you get the rest of the current year, the
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The number of miles you earn per flights varies, but that 12,500 mile bar can be reached on just one or two long flights. Flights on partner airlines also count, though sometimes at reduced rates.
The best way to approach this is to be looking for good qualifying fares and to plan one for the second half of June. Then call on June 17th and enroll in the challenge. Make sure that you credit all flights to American— it won’t work if you credit them to, say, Alaska.
To sign up, call +1 800-882-8880 and say you’d like to do the Platinum challenge. They also have a Gold challenge, but it’s not nearly as good of a deal.
If you get status on any airline, you are most likely able to status match to another airline. A classic match is to go from American to Alaska, as American is the easiest to earn, Alaska is the most valuable, and Alaska is easy to match to.
Once you finish your year with Alaska, you can then match to someone else again, thus continuing the cycle until you run out of airlines. Occasionally you’ll requalify for status the next year and won’t need to match. This happens often on Alaska because they have such a good program.
To find out how to match to specific airlines and whether they’re likely to approve or not, go ...
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luckily there’s one site that keeps track of all of this information and makes it easy to look it up. The site is called WheretoCredit.com.
To use it you must know the fare class of your ticket. This will be a single letter (F, J, Q, Y, etc), and is often a little bit difficult to find, especially before you’ve made the booking. Often it’s found under fare terms or “more details”. If you search Google for something like “How to find fare class United”, you’ll be able to find current instructions per airline.
Once you know the fare code, simply enter it with the airline into htt...
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To figure out how many miles your flight is, simply plug the airports into http://gcmap.com.
If you are gearing up for travel, it’s worth getting a good credit card first, and then doing Global Entry, which also comes with PreCheck. That will save you $100 and give you most of the program benefits.
Average time to pass through customs is approximately 30 seconds, instead of 5-60 minutes. Besides saving a tremendous amount of time over the course of the five years the card is active, having a consistently quick experience allows you to book short connections that you would otherwise not be confident you could make.
To apply for Global Entry, just visit the site https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs. Pay for it using a credit card which reimburses Global Entry fees (notably, the top tier Amex, Citi, and Chase cards) and make sure to apply for it instead of PreCheck, since it will also give that to you for free.
To apply, go to https://www.cbp.gov/travel/trusted-traveler-programs, but it’s better to just apply for Global Entry, which also includes PreCheck automatically.
A less well-known program offered by the United States is the ability to get a second valid passport, to be used simultaneously with your first one. Sometimes you have to send your passport off to embassies to get visas, but also need to travel internationally at the same time.
If you say that you travel a lot and need to send it away for visas, plus you may travel to the Middle East, your request will be granted.
The downside of the second passport is that it costs the same as a regular one, but is only valid for two years. For this reason it’s best to send your main one away for long-term visas, and travel on the second one. When I’m not shuffling visas, I like leaving one passport in a pocket in my backpack so that I never have to worry about forgetting a passport.
Clear costs $179 per year, which is a tough sell. Luckily I have a couple ways to get it cheaper. The first is that if you sign up for Delta’s loyalty program, it will knock the price down to $99 per year. Also, up to three additional users are $50 each and do not have to be related to you, so you can get four people total for $250, or $62.50 per person per year.
Lounges typically charge day rates of about $60, which is never worth it. Almost no one in the lounge is actually paying that, though, as most gain free access through credit cards.
There is a free app available for Android and iOS called LoungeBuddy. With it you can input all of the credit cards and status that you have and it will tell you per airport which lounges you can access. Keeping track without this app is very difficult and will result in you missing out on lounges you could otherwise visit.
If you have a lot of time, you can almost always enter the “wrong” terminal for the sole purpose of going to the lounge. If the TSA agent tells you that you’re in the wrong place, just tell them that you’re going to the lounge first. While this should work all the time in the United States, it doesn’t always work internationally, as they sometimes segment their airports differently.
Centurion lounges are consistently the best lounges, and are currently expanding around the globe. They always have showers and great meals.
The only way to get into Centurion Lounges for free is to have a platinum or black card from American Express.
Additional users on the Amex cards also currently get access to Centurion lounges. As of this writing, the cost is $175 total for up to four additional cardholders.
PriorityPass is a network of over 1000 lounges all around the world. All of them are operated by third parties, including some airlines, but having a PriorityPass allows you free access.
