Month: April 2019

Bad Travel Hacks

~ admin ~ Leave a comment

Lets be honest this isn’t the only website that gives travel advice, there are a lot of ‘Travel Hacks’ around.

Not all of them are useful, so here are a couple I have seen, but I won’t be using:

Booking Separate Plane Tickets For A Single Journey

Yes it might be cheaper but it takes a lot longer if you have to collect your bags and then check in again.

If your first flight is late the next plane won’t wait and then you have to re-book and pay extra.

I would rather book through one airline. . . . . faster connection and if you miss the connection you will be automatically booked on the next flight, and put up in a hotel

Check All Your Bags (So there is less to carry)

Besides wasting time waiting at baggage, things aren’t going to go well if your bags get lost.

I’ve heard of people spending a week on a cruise with only the clothes they were wearing when they got off the plane.

The airlines will pay up to $200 compensation but that’s not going to go far buying clothes at the cruise ship shops.

I don’t have any problem with people checking in a bag as I occasionally do it myself . . . . but I always have a carry-on with enough clothes and other basics for 3-4 days.

What bad travel advice have you seen?

Collecting Points

~ admin ~ Leave a comment

There are a huge range of ways of collecting frequent flyer points.

With flying a lot less now I am retired a very small proportion that I collect are actually earned flying.

Qantas

As Australians we find it more useful to concentrate on collecting Qantas points, as they more useful to us.

Here are the the ways my wife and I collected 217,453 Qantas Points in the past year:

  • Credit cards and banking 175,605 (81%) – Including changing credit card with a 100,000 bonus.
  • Flights 20,750 (9%) – Of the 29 flights we took only 6 earned us Qantas points.
  • Shopping 16,530 (7%) – Mainly Woolworth supermarket and fuel.
  • Surveys 4,568 (3%) – I am registered with a Qantas survey site which pays me in points to do marketing surveys.

Even though we are keen points collectors we didn’t earn anything on restaurant meals, car hire, hotels, travel money, or insurance.

To give you an idea of what those points are worth we used them, with some points previously collected, for 2 Business Class single tickets to London in May this year (128,000 points each)

Other Airlines

I also collected 14,125 Emirates points and 3,400 Lufthansa points from trips to Iran and Bangkok .

No Additional Spending

None of the points we have gained have resulted us in any additional expenditure over what we would otherwise have spent.

We did get a new premium credit card but I have previously explained there are offsetting savings with that card.

Why not look to finance some of your holidays with Frequent flyer points?

Disclaimer I haven’t been paid or received any benefit from this post.