Bring Me That Horizon

Sign Up for All the Miles Programs! Or, the Part Where You Fill Out All the Forms

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:48:22 -0800

In our continuing quest to hack all the travel, sometimes, we must fill out a bunch of forms. This is because we want the airlines, and their alliances, to know who we are, so they can give us all the sweet, sweet miles we long for.

To do this, we need frequent flier numbers. Thus, the filling out of forms.

Since, if you don’t really enjoy repetative typing of course, you’ve already gotten hooked up with LastPass this won’t be too inordinately painful.

So, without further ado, the list:

Frequent Flyer Program Master List

LastPass. Get It. You'll Thank Me Later.

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:03:47 -0800

In the immediate future of you, the fledgeling travel hacker, you will be signing up for all of the frequent-flier programs. All of them. Yes, I’m serious. (Yes, the next post will, in fact, be a list of them.)

This will, by it’s very nature, be a pain in the ass. No one likes filling out forms, keeping track of large quantities of difficult to remember information, or making up a zillion usernames and passwords. All of those things suck.

What the hell? You ask. Do you want me to get discouraged and give up?

Hell no! I answer. I’m just winding you up so I can tell you that you can avoid most of that crap and be more secure and less annoyed on the internet than ever before.

The answer, is a site called LastPass.

LastPass is a secure, web-based password manager and form filler. Once configured, LastPass can fill milage program forms with your personal information, so you don’t have to re-type it roughly one million times, save your usernames and passwords for each program once you have created them. Usefully, with it’s secure notes feature, you can also store all of your frequent flier numbers in a single secure document.

But why a tool like this and not just a document on my PC? You ask. What are you, a walking advert?

That, I answer, is the best part. LastPass is cloud-based and multi-platform. You can get your information when and wherever—even your smartphone with the crazy-cheap premium service; and you won’t lose it in a computer crash.

Finding Flights, or Getting to Where You Want to Be

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:10:41 -0800

It’s interesting and more than a little serendipitous the way the world works. Not ten minutes after I started this blog I had a conversation with one of my co-worker about none other than finding a good, inexpensive flight.

Bar none, the best way to find such a flight is Hipmunk.

Not quite a travel hack, but easily the best place to search for good prices and flight plans that don’t suck. I usually even run my rewards flights through this, just to see if another airline will have better times or more desirable layovers than the one I’m thinking of flying.

The reason I do this is mainly because their search page looks like this:

Thats all the airlines they index in one grid. Flight durations and layovers laid out in a visual form. The ability to sort by pretty much whatever parameters you want, including “agony” which tend to be the cheapest flights. (Oddly, those are often the ones I like. Leaving for a destination in the early morning and returning late at night is my preference. So the term is more than a little subjective.)

If you want real agony try to fly from Boston to Sacramento on Alaska. No, on second thought, don’t. Yeeeesh!

Hipmunk also has the ability to do a fuzzy search of sorts, searching on either side of a specified date in case there is a cheaper/better flight if your plans can flex a little. You can even compare multiple searches at once, using an oh-so-sweet tabbed search interface to flip between searches.

You can use all of these features without logging in or giving the site a scrap of information.* However, if you log in to the site with Google it can interface with your calendar to give you only flights that fit into your schedule.

* Unless, of course, you purchase a ticket with them, which is similarly painless and often a good bet if you’re paying your way. Of course, that’s not really the point of what we’re trying to do here, but it is a good option if you should need to exchange cash for tickets. Be sure to have your frequent flier numbers handy if you do pay for tickets. You can never have too many miles!)

So What the Hell is a Travel Hack?

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:23:11 -0800

I don’t know that I’m necessarily an expert on the subject of travel hacking. I’ve been at it for around 8 months now and I spend a lot more time working and sleeping than actually working at getting miles. Still, I do fly for free quite a bit, and my friends have made me realize that I have quite a bit of knowledge to share.

This blog will be my attempt at doing just that.

Travel hacking is, at it’s simplest, using frequent flier miles to fly for free.

What the hell? You say. Don’t I have to y’know, fly to get frequent flier miles? Isn’t that kind of…the point?

Of course not, that wouldn’t be much fun, nor much of a hack. The real fun is in finding ways to get frequent flier miles for no cost, or for doing things that you would be doing anyway.

How to go about that will be the point of this blog. Sharing what I know and what I’m still learning with you.

Submit your own tips and ask questions. Lets go to all the places!