When planning our trip home from Australia and New Zealand we originally booked an economy class American Airlines flight from Auckland to Los Angeles that departed Auckland on Sunday afternoon. About a month before our scheduled departure I called American to check on the status of our Systemwide Upgrades and thankfully reached a fantastic American…
In just over a week I’m going to once again get on a plane and head to Asia. Next weeks flights are the last in a series of Cathay Pacific flights I booked in late 2018. Likewise, with these flights I’ll finally have earned enough miles to once again qualify for Executive Platinum status. While…
In the final hours of 2018 Cathay Pacific published what have become known as the fares of a decade. Mistake fares happen, but are becoming ever more rare. Which each mistake there is a mad dash to book them as quickly as possible before the fare dies. The old adage is book now, figure it…
Well, in less than a month now I’ll be heading back to Asia. I’ll get back on a Cathay Pacific plane and fly from New York to Vancouver to Hong Kong to Vietnam. With that however, all of my booked travel will come to an end… in Vietnam. So, in order to get back from…
When people learn about my travel addiction hobby, they almost always ask for at least one tip that they may not know about. That is, if they are still standing there listening to me rambling on about loyalty programs… For a while my advice was the basic stuff about joining a loyalty program or opening…
Every year hotel chains offer some pretty fantastic promotions to earn points more quickly. Obviously I’m never going to turn down free points, but I often find hotels points become much less valuable over time. Because of this, the only way to get truly great hotel redemptions is to take advantage of promotions and earn…
While I realize it’s still several weeks before the year’s halfway point, in a certain way, for me, the year is already well more than halfway over. Already this year I’ve earned 92,000 Elite Qualifying Miles and just over $13,000 Elite Qualifying Dollars with the American Airlines AAdvantage program. That’s just shy of the 100,000…
After spending a few hours in the Sydney Airport it was finally time to board our Qantas flight from Sydney to Auckland to continue or trip down under. Although the flight awkwardly departed in the early evening my girlfriend and I specifically picked it because it was on one of Qantas’ Airbus A330 aircraft. Almost…
One of the things that I love about traveling as much as I’ve been fortunate enough to do is that you gain experience. You learn how to haggle, you learn how to cut corners, and you learn to be thrifty. All in all, I’d argue that traveling allows you to learn “street smarts” the quickest…
As my girlfriend and I continued our vacation in Oceania we left our hotel in Sydney, hopped on a ferry, transferred to a train, and arrived at Sydney Airport. The trip to the airport took a lot less time than anticipated so we ended up with about 3 hours to burn at the airport before…
