Traveling is stressful for most people – after all, it requires a dizzying amount of preparation for one’s trip. Ranging from luggage, what to pack, where to stay, length of trips, and so on. There’s really no shortage of headaches when it comes to travel. And this is all without flights and airline tickets. As we all know, buying an expensive ticket feels like giving up a pound of flesh. It’s not fun, but there would be no vacation without it.
As such, we have gone ahead and curated 3 little known but devastatingly effective travel hacks for frequent flyers. Considering all the stress and anxiety that is brought on by travel and everything it requires, we want to help alleviate that stress by taking the most stressful aspect of traveling – flights – and making it easier for our readers.
Without further ado, here are the frequent flyer travel hacks that we are huge fans of:
Discounted First Class Tickets
Did you know that you can sell your miles for cash? Yep, you read that right. Although airlines don’t love this, it is 100% legal in every US state except for Utah. This would require finding a trustworthy online mileage broker in order to flip your miles for cash. Now the question is, why are brokers buying up miles from frequent flyers? The answer is that these brokers then use these miles to get first class tickets, and the cost of the tickets are significantly cheaper with miles than with cash. So essentially, you can either sell your extra miles for cash, or buy more miles and then fly first class for cheap. Either way, the frequent flyer gets a pretty good deal (unless of course they prefer to spend their miles on gift cards).
Free Stopover City Tours
Often times, flights are cheaper with a stopover, because most people want to fly directly to their destination. But what if we told you that you could stopover in a city for longer than just 8 painful hours in an airport, but rather 24 hours in a city, complete with free transportation and hotel? It sounds crazy, but if you search hard enough, certain airlines do offer these amenities in order to get you to stay over in their parent cities. This is because it is cheaper for them to have you stopover, so much so that sometimes they will indeed pay for your transportation and lodging! In order to find these deals you will have to really research, but here is an example of Qatar Airways offering a free hotel stay.
Price Alerts
Did you know that your flight ticket prices may fluctuate quite a bit over the span of just a week? This means that if you are planning a vacation that is 6 months from now, you have the luxury of setting up price alerts instead of just buying the ticket immediately at a potentially higher price. There are a few price alert websites (Skyscanner seems to be the most popular), which will send you alerts on when and if your price drops. Now, in case you are wondering “well what if my flight only goes up in price if I wait?!”, then don’t you worry – many of these price alert websites offer price predictors. After you enter your flight schedule, the website will tell if you its worthwhile to wait. I once did this and paid $80 less for my flight by waiting just 2 days.
Whether you end up selling your extra miles, enjoying a free stopover in a foreign city, or saving money on airfare, we hope that we have lessened the normally anxious preparations of frequent flyers all over!
