What are the Principle of Travel Hacking?
Travel hacking is a great and inexpensive way to travel to different places and see most of the world. You don’t have to spend tens or hundreds of hours of your time planning and managing your trip. Just know the goals of your trip and get help from your bank account.
The basic principle of travel hacking is to learn about the inventory rules set by airlines, credit cards and hotels and use them to your advantage to get cheap travel deals including flights, accommodation and more. Travel hacking is nothing new.
What statistics show is that four out of five people who sit in the first class section of airplanes are not rich? They simply know what to do and are intelligent. You may go into the world of travel hacking to have a good flight and use first class amenities on the majority of your flights.
Travelers who use travel hacking have mastered this and can even use the same method for their business trips to have a much cheaper trip. Especially for those who go on business trips a lot, this issue is very helpful and helps to reduce their expenses.
This article has been prepared to learn more about travel hacking, and most of the principles and standards mentioned in it are at the global level. We should know that the way and method of travel hacking in Iran has its own conditions.
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What is travel hacking?
Travel hacking is a solution that people use to get tickets, hotels, etc. and find the best ways to make their trip cheaper. Travel hacking usually involves signing up for loyalty or loyalty cards from banks, hotels, or airlines. To get some of these cards, you just need to register in them to get points, but to get the points of some others, you have to pay certain fees for a short period of time.
The question you probably have is whether cheap travel is the same as travel hacking or not. In cheap travel, people try to use cheaper tickets, stay in hostels instead of hotels, eat in cheap local restaurants, and so on. In fact, in cheap travel, most people try to travel cheaper by saving money. But in travel hacking you learn to be aware of the services they offer to their customers when you are a customer of a bank, an airline, or even stores and make the best use of them.
In the rest of this article, we will try to familiarize you more with travel hacking terms and then we will discuss the things that everyone should know and use in order to save their travel expenses.
Familiarity with travel hacking terms
- Loyalty or customer club programs: These programs are set up by banks, credit card companies, airlines, and hotels to reward customers for their business. For example, buying a flight from an airline or paying for a night in a hotel is a gift to their customers. Hoping that their customers will become loyal customers and come back again and use their services.
- Points: These points are the units that are issued in loyalty programs so that they can provide their services to people in this way. This is what travel hackers collect and when they reach the required amount, they can use them to get a free hotel stay or free flight.
- Miles: This is exactly the same thing as points; with the difference that it is only issued for airline loyalty programs. But hotels and banks refer to this as a bonus.
- Transferable Points: Some points can only be used in a specific loyalty program series. But some of them are transferable and you can transfer them to your other loyalty programs so that you have more points in one place and you can use them all together.
- Buying shares of airlines or hotels: To use some of the facilities of airlines or hotels, you can buy their shares.
- Gift flight or stay: This is your flight or hotel stay that you can use the points or miles you have collected or transfer it to your other points after receiving it through the loyalty program.
- Bonus chart: With the aid of your accrued miles or points, this chart indicates which hotels, flights, rooms, etc. you can utilize.
- Dynamic Pricing: This is a term used to describe the way airlines or hotel chains that do not use an award chart, but instead use dynamic pricing, allow hotel and flight costs to change at any time. Just like when you want to buy a plane ticket.
How to start travel hacking?
Know the best offers on every flight
Probably the first step to having a trip for most people is buying a plane ticket. In the rest of this article, we will provide you with explanations about how to buy tickets and how to use airline company privileges.
Before buying a ticket, search for the ticket price of your destination on different sites and use the best available price. If your trip is international and you plan to travel with an international airline, visit the foreign websites of that airline to see if the plane ticket is cheaper in another currency.
Don’t look for big airlines and check all the flights that fly to your destination. Smaller airlines may have cheaper tickets, but they won’t show up anywhere except on the airlines own site.
Contact a travel agent who has experience with your destination and get the information you need.
Fortunately, we live in an age where everyone has access to the Internet and you can easily find anything you need by searching.
You probably think to yourself that this is what everyone does and you have always traveled this way. But this is not the whole story.
The first thing you need to do to travel hack is to sign up for rewards cards in programs that you find useful. It depends on your purpose and type of travel. If you’re looking to save money on airline tickets, focus on earning airline miles or transferable points. Focus on hotel-related cards to save on hotel fees. Try to look for cards that offer at least 50,000 points or miles. For example, the Alaska Airlines Rewards Card is 30,000 miles that comes with a free companion ticket.
Also Read | How to Find a Travel Companion
Spend with strategy
For example, buy gift cards that belong to stores that you normally shop at.
Write down your points in a specific place. Update your expenses for this on a monthly basis in a place like Google Sheets so it’s always with you. This will help you to know if you are not paying enough or if you are spending too much to get a plane ticket.
But be aware that if a card does not apply to you, cancel it before the annual fee.
It is better to get a little help from travel hackers to make these things clearer. One of the travel hackers says: According to the standards for travel hacking, my method is a simple method. Years ago I chose an airline that I wanted to fly with. I used this airline’s tickets every time I wanted to travel to Rome even though it was $50 more expensive than other companies and thus became a loyal customer. At the same time, I received a credit card from the same company. Just when I least expected it, I got one bonus mile at check-in that made my plane ticket free, along with a package that had a leather case inside.
But for someone who cannot be a loyal customer of an airline, this solution is not the best option.
Travel rewards credit cards offer more rewards per dollar spent, and airline cards have higher annual fees and higher-than-average interest rates, so if you can’t make steady payments each month It is better not to go for these cards. But if you have a regular flight schedule and always use the same airline, this can be a good option for you.
So the first step to travel hacking is to collect points and miles that you can use on time and correctly. But the story of travel hacking does not end here. If you are interested in its subject, you can read more about it and learn its method.
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