Travel Hacking with the Telecom Informer

I had a question whether it's okay to take pictures if you want to take pictures of me you can i'm not sure who'd want to are the doors between the rooms normally open okay I'll just wait until they get close and then that so I'll talk over the other speaker awesome well thanks for coming at the end of the day to kind of a mundane talk on on not hacking computers as some of you may know I like to hack on different things I write for 2600 a column called the telecom informer and I've been writing that for I think the past seven years now on page 13 of every issue and so as I've been doing that I've gotten to

travel around the world quite a lot and so I've learned a bit about how to do that for really cheap or free and that's grown into me getting really interested in the house and the whys of how travel is priced and how people like us can maybe take advantage of some mistake fares and other techniques I visited all seven continents not many people can say that but I've actually like managed to do it on a pretty shoestring budget you know I'm not actually making a lot of money I've been working in China on a Chinese salary and so you know it doesn't actually take a huge amount of money to do this my first overseas trip

that was a big overseas trip actually was in 1996 and it was on a mistake fair was two hundred ninety nine dollars Canadian I told my college roommates that I was going to Tokyo for the weekend and they didn't believe me but I actually dead so um you know at that back at the time like that was around two hundred dollars us so you know the thing is like this isn't new none of these techniques that I'm going to share are particularly new it's just they're not especially well-known right now as i mentioned i lived and worked in beijing from 2010 and through 2013 so you know traveling from there I didn't have a lot of money

so I had to learn how to do it kind of on the cheap and the last year I lived and studied in the Netherlands and Costa Rica so you know again like I had no income and was still travelling this is where I've been in 2014 so far it doesn't cover trips that I planned like I have another round the world trip coming up and a trip to Europe in I think a month on top of that but you know this is this is so far where I've been the one thing I'm not super happy with is my carbon footprint that's one thing that if you really care about the environment you should pay attention to

if you start travel hacking you can end up having a whopping carbon carbon footprint like I do so be sure that what you're getting out of travel is you know actually worth your environmental impact you know you can call me some kind of like weird green hippie but actually we're all completely screwed if we don't pay attention to the environment more than we do so here's some of the interesting places I've been I went to Antarctica Armenia Bosnia and North Korea the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus you can read the list yeah a couple of the more interesting places are Palau and seal and both pretty rarely visited penguins are cool that's me with the North Korean Admiral of all

the crazy things it's and this is the police officer who arrested me in Armenia but it all worked out at the end so um it really did so yeah go by the way stay out of jail in foreign countries it's a good idea so what is travel hacking exactly you know like when we talk about packing stuff like how can you hack trouble well there are mistake fares there are some routing tricks that you can play there's some loopholes and frequent flyer programs there's you know credit card bonuses that you can get sometimes through frequent flyer programs there's really a lot more you know you'll find a ton of stuff written on the internet but that actually like that only

scratches the surface there's way more than that so use your hacker brain and think like a hacker because it really is up to your imagination how you can get away with seeing the world for surprisingly little so uh what to me makes an awesome travel hack um you know there's a few criteria that I think that are like fairly important when it comes to what's a hack versus what isn't I think a hack is something that allows you to travel for little or for nothing and you know there's a really big difference here you you'll read a lot of stuff about upgrade hacks where you can you know maybe buy a more expensive ferrer but for cheaper than it would

normally be and then it's an upgradeable fair right well that isn't a hack you didn't hack anything you paid the airline more you lost they won I mean this is uh so that's not a hack be sure you you pay attention to what a hacker he is you know something that's a hack is entirely legal under the contract uh and it's something that the airline can't decide to just take back later and that's a fairly important point like so sometimes you can get a hack and get away with something but if it isn't legal under the contract I mean that's like a really sketchy hack and especially if you are doing that on a round trip itinerary and you get found

out halfway through or even worse like not even at the final destination of your itinerary you can have a real problem so frequent flier hacks are a great example of this there are a lot of things you can do with frequent flyer programs sometimes you can get away with a surprising amount until you can't because with frequent flyer programs the the rules allow the airline to pretty much do whatever the hell they want and that can be a real problem so what else is a hack it's not something that's really well known because if it's well known it's going to get shut down you know this isn't like hacking computers because actually if you find an awesome

travel hack it's going to cost somebody real tangible cash and that tends to get watched more carefully than things like security vulnerabilities or like you're patched right so if it's published on dozens of travel blogs whatever your you found isn't going to last for long and you know finally like a travel hack takes you somewhere that's safe it takes you somewhere you actually would want to visit and I'll give you an example like there's this one blogger who gets caught up in this stuff and he was writing about how he went to san pedro sula honduras if you looked at place up like it's one of the most dangerous places in the world you know

you can't go out at night it's yeah you're dodging bullets essentially i'm risking your life is in the travel hack unless that's really what you wanted to do or you know another thing you might think is wow you found a really great deal except it's to the caribbean in the hurricane season and then you know you're spending all of your time there behind plywood and hoping you don't get mowed down and blown away like Dorothy it's just not good so uh make sure your hacks are real hack like that's actually the for sanity check that I would always suggest when you start getting into this stuff because it's very easy to get caught up in what's a good deal or free

and well you know poop is also free you don't necessarily want it so a mistake fares what's a mistake fair so airlines will occasionally publish these and it's like that two hundred ninety nine dollar trip that I got to Tokyo somebody screwed up you know airfares are entered by humans they can enter the like wrong number and so all of a sudden like something that should have started with the four is starting with the one on the numeric keypad it happens this in the past year this has happened an awful lot like an unusual amount even for airlines you know Delta United via this like crazy Norwegian site called witter oh it's like one of the it's a star

alliance affiliate carrier and alitalia have all had really bad mistake Ferris you know fares as little as zero dollars plus tax you know one example of the of a mistake fair is a fair that I'm taking in November I'm going from Los Angeles to Boston rome to Budapest to Amsterdam to Beijing and what I paid for that was mostly just taxed it was four hundred and fifty dollars and thirty cents you can never get out of the tax with a mistake fair but you know because those are priced separately but you know most of this is taxed so I by the time you get done with the calculating the value of the frequent flyer miles that I will earn on

this mistake fair because I actually will earn miles it's like paying two hundred and nineteen dollars and yes I'm in Beijing at the end of this so I had to get back to the US unless I just decided to live in Beijing again so I paid thirty thousand miles that I got for free with Alaska Airlines and you know that's like the four hundred and fifty dollars and thirty cents that I quoted like includes the tax that I paid to get back from Beijing to LA so and in addition to that I'll show you later that I added on a free trip to Seattle for Christmas because that's a possibility using a loophole so mistake

fares are usually pretty safe to use if you find them because if the fair is at least a dollar you have a contract and the great thing with contracts is if you want to get out of them you totally can't get out of a contract with an airline right you know there's a two hundred and fifty dollar change fee or if it's delta like tickets are now completely non refundable so why should you let them out of their contract you shouldn't don't feel bad about holding them to it but if the fair is zero dollars you don't have a contract they could just refund the tax that you paid because that was collected on behalf of

the government it wasn't actually a fair so they could probably make a plausible argument that you don't have a contract lately airlines have just been honoring these things you know it's just it's they don't want to take it to court because if there's legal precedent it could get really bad for them if it doesn't go their way so so far like as long as it's not costing them too much they're just going ahead and honoring the mistake fares that are out there but there is a really glaring exception right this is super risky with frequent flyer programs so you may find a mistake fair with frequent flyer points and one of these happened around nine

months ago with United there were these tickets that were advertised at the wrong number of miles so you could go to Europe for you know basically like the number of points of taking a short haul flight within the US and United didn't honor this like they totally didn't they said nope in the fine print in the contract of the mileage plus program we don't have to honor it and we're not going to and they just refunded everybody there miles and whatever money they paid and they totally didn't honor those tickets at all and there wasn't a contract because the contract with the frequent flyer ticket is different it's it essentially says we can do whatever

the hell we want you have no recourse you are completely at our mercy and that's pretty much you know what the contract says even though it's six pages that's what's in it so the other fun thing is if an airline thinks you did something sketchy to get that mistake frequent fiery Redemption then they can actually say you are a bad evil hacker we found you on google and clearly liked the fact that you're doing this is because you're a hacker and we're taking away all your miles and even if you paid for those miles they can totally do it because in the contract it just basically says that all of the rules and the interpretation of the rules are

completely up to them so here's the key know where you have leverage if you have leverage don't feel bad using it but if you don't have any leverage like you know just no one to go quietly away and not be the angry guy who's trying to argue on the phone with somebody who can actually make things way worse than they already are so uh what's a fuel dump the fuel dumps are something that I think that everybody in this room will be really really interested in so and there's not a lot of detail on this slide for a reason right I don't want it to be searchable so airline tickets are priced through these very crusty old

legacy systems that were made you know that we're put together like largely in the 60s and 70s a lot of airline pricing is is done with like sketchy joins on flat file databases using you know COBOL and at some point of complexity sometimes the calculations can break down and so there are like a lot of techniques that can be used to combine this generally only works on international itineraries and it generally only works on intercontinental itineraries right so you need to be going from one continent to another continent for example North America and South America or North America to Europe something you're up to Asia you know throw Africa and there somewhere continents are our designated

if you do some searching on the internet by numbers so you've got like c1 c2 c3 that kind of thing and what you can do is you can introduce a certain element of complexity into a search into a fair search whereby the calculation will drop out the fuel surcharge if you introduce the correct amount of complexity and so what am I talking about um well if you do if you were for example to do what's called the third strike I'm hearing a little bit feedback is there somebody who's working on the mixer maybe turn it down a little I'll try to back up a little bit okay yeah that's not going to work there we

go sorry about that guys testing one two three just a moment should I protect okay

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now now now okay there we go I hope that meowing wasn't on video this is going to show up on some some YouTube video later I don't know anything you ever do on camera you've got a problem so okay so what if you can make a fuel surcharge go away that's really awesome because so in order to do these like tax dodges that aren't particularly scrupulous airlines sometimes will price affair like a dollar for the fair and four hundred dollars for a fuel surcharge because they have to pay tax on the fair but they don't have to pay tax on the fuel surcharge that's why airlines do this that's why fuel dump as possible so

basically if you are able to find a way to make that fuel surcharge go away you can have a fair that's dollar well affair that's a dollar is a fair that's a dollar like on the last slide that we we talked about if you paid a dollar for your fair then you have a contract and you know if the fuel surcharge was something they just failed the price basically that's on them and it's not on you so you know there are a couple of techniques that you can do and essentially what they involve are you know I'll get to this on a later slide to explain how it works but here's an example of what a fuel dump can look

like so I'm taking this trip and it was 219 dollars that the technique that you know like after the value of the miles was 219 dollars and the technique that was involved here was a fuel up alitalia was trying to dodge their tax and it ended up costing them far more so miles and points simultaneously they're the easiest and the most frustrating way to travel for free it's not just frequent flyer programs there's actually some Bank programs and there's some hotel programs that you can use so why do I say that they're simultaneously he is and the most frustrating it's really easy to get points and it's actually generally fairly hard to use them unless you get really good at

finding some unconventional ways of redeeming them so one of the things that I write about a lot on c 31 b which is my travel blog is unconventional ways to find frequent flier inventory and you know how you can actually maybe be able to cash in these points for a trip that's free but it's not in the good seat you know it's going to be in like seat 31 be like this seat right here all the way in the back of the plane you know next to the toilets that's not the seat you want to be sitting in with the chemical smell of yak wafting over you every time the door opens but if it was

free probably it's okay and you know that's the seat you're getting because that's the seat that they give away for free you just have to be very creative and how you search for things Bank programs well Bank programs are interesting there's a lot of you know there are a lot of banks that are trying to get into this game and they they have these points city has thank you reward points if you talked to chase they have their own formal point American Express like most people know about their points these points are both really good and really bad they're great because they have a variety of different programs that you can transfer them into or you

can actually just spend them like money so most Bank programs the points will be worth a penny each so if you sign up for a new credit card and it comes with 50,000 bank points typically it's going to be good for like five hundred dollars you know good toward a ticket that you put through email like Expedia like a captive expedia portal essentially that's usually not the best value for redeeming these things because you can usually transfer them sometimes with bonuses into airline frequent flyer programs or even hotel programs which then can transfer into airline programs so before you go redeem your bank points it's a you know you kind of need to like put together a spreadsheet and figure

out what the best Redemption value is going to be and there's a lot of websites that can help you do that but bank points are dangerous and the reason why they are is so the way bank points are the best is they have these like they slice up spending into categories so you can get these like awesome category bonuses of like five points for a dollar if you spend them at certain kinds of merchants so what if for example you found that drug stores paid five times points and a valid drugstore purchase was something called a vanilla reload which could then be used to load an American Express prepaid product called a bluebird and so

basically you're just moving cash around in a circle and getting five points per dollar that you move in a circle well you know a lot of people did this and there are two banks Capital One and chase that just began to cut people off and take all their points because you know the thing with these programs is the fine print basically says you know similar to frequent flyer programs the fine print says the bank can pretty much do whatever the hell they want and anytime they want and if they decide to just shut you down and take all your points they can totally do that because points aren't money they can be redeemed for money and you know like it's a club

and you're a member of it and if they kick you out of the club for like whatever reason then you just don't get any value realized and it's all totally legal and if you want to sue you can't because you have to take it to arbitration right so this is a you know this stuff is pretty risky but you can get some really good value from bank programs just bear in mind that if you milk it too much you might get shut down hotel programs these are pretty useful like they're not good just for hotels Starwood points for example they're fantastic points because you can transfer them to a variety of airline programs and you can also redeem them at

star window towels likes you know like Bank points and frequent flyer points if you take off Starwood too much they can also shut you down and take away your points but they don't have a record for doing this they've actually been like a very stable mileage earning currency so Starwood is actually like you one of the it's considered one of the better loyalty currencies in the business so if you have a way to earn like a lot of hotel points like that maybe something that you would consider doing so miles and points hacks there's a credit card signup bonuses so like a lot of these guys a lot of banks will have signup bonuses at various times

that are like pretty high to hit their quarterly numbers you know I did an internship at a very large bank and I saw people all around me trying to hit quarterly targets you know this this is like a very common thing right now is not the end of a quarter so it's not a great time to run out and start wat signing up for you know for credit card mileage programs there's only one good one right now which is a 50,000 point bonus from from Chase for their united united mileage plus card there are some links out there that will waive the annual fee give you a fifty-dollar statement credit and give you 50,000 points for free and these are you know

that's good for two free round-trip tickets within North America so it's not a bad deal that's the kind of the benchmark of what what you should be looking at as a good deal well can you sign up for more than one credit card you sure can uh I do these things called a parameter all apply for like six or seven cards all on the same day and it doesn't actually like freak out the banks when you're kidding your credit seven times on the same day because it doesn't like this is a kind of a FICO hack it doesn't lower your score like each time you do it on the same day it lowers it a lot the next day so you'll

end up getting improved for all these cards and then like your credit score will take like you know a 20-point hit or something but the funny part is like six months later your credit scores back up above where it was before because you have so many accounts you're managing well and your average credit utilization is down so it's it's kind of it's kind of weird like you know my score went up 10 points after my last appt arama and so what you have to do to get a credit card sign-up bonus typically as you sign up for a new card watch the blog's that you're looking at because most of these have affiliate links and your

be making the bloggers like fifty or a hundred dollars but you know you may not be getting the best deal out there so there's a site that I like a lot called free frequent flyer miles calm it's like just some total miles nerd and he's always got the best links and they're not affiliate ones so you know that's that's a good place to look but basically if you're going to do signup bonuses there's a couple of things you've got to do you typically have to hit a minimum spend and then you really need to stay on top of like when the annual fee is due and whether it's waived what I think a good credit card

sign that bonus deal is is one where the minimum spend is not a huge amount and you don't actually have to like pay the annual fee the first year because then you can just cancel the card after you at the points the banks don't like it but it's great for you manufactured spending we talked about that a little bit so you know there's a couple of ways that you can do manufactured spending essentially what that is is you're buying something that you can then turn into cash so you're not actually spending the money you're you know maybe you're paying some small fees along the way but you know you're getting the miles and you're not really spending the

money use your hacker brain to think of the kinds of things that you can buy in order to manufacture spend if you look on travel blogs like a lot of people were buying this product at CVS drugstores called the vanilla reload which is this like there's all these products for people who can't get bank accounts and one of them is called the American Express blue bird which is a walmart product it's like a partnership with american express and walmart right and you can kind of use it as like a pseudo bank account if you can't get a bank account for whatever reason like bad credit or or what have you well you know you can use it as well if you don't

have that credit there's no reason why not and the best part with with with this particular product is there's like a lot of different ways to reload it so you can buy a product for 503 dollars and ninety-five cents called a vanilla reload that'll put five hundred dollars in credit into your American Express blouberg which you can bend by the way ACH ACH transfer to your bank so you know essentially you're paying four dollars per you know five hundred dollars that you move well that's shut down you can't buy these with a credit card anymore but you can buy other things that you can load a bluebird with in different ways you know you're going to have to figure

this out on your own because I can't spoon feed everybody but I am sure that using your hacker brand you will figure out what kinds of products that you can buy that you might be able to load a bluebird with but what else is there besides a bluebird there's that's not the only like I'm poor and can't get a bank account product in the US that's just the one that all the travel waters are pushing there's way more so if you start thinking like a hacker and doing your research you're going to find ways to move enormous amounts of money and what does that do for you well you earn typically a point for every dollar that

you spend or two or three because you do this with category this is right so what can end up happening is if you spend your weekends like or at least part of your weekend you know like running around to a few stores you can very easily get yourself you know enough points for tickets to anywhere in the world you want to go for cheaper very free so I want to talk a little bit about extreme couponing because this is something that's super cool and it doesn't happen very often but when it does it's super awesome and oh I back to manufactured spending for a minute because this is kind of like a cross between extreme couponing and

manufactured spending there was a there was a deal with the u.s. mint not too long ago this this was two years ago now where you could buy an unlimited amount of coins with your credit card because they were trying to get one dollar coins into circulation you could buy these sacagawea's and pay with your credit card and they you know the delivery was free and then you could just take them down to the bank and deposit them because they came in rolls yeah like banks weren't super happy to get them but they have to take deposits of US currency like they're required to do this so basically for free you could just manufacture as many miles as you

wanted and it took like six months before the US Mint figured out this was a really bad deal for them because they were paying all the all the credit card fees whole along right you know you're buying dollar for like less than a dollar it's a great deal for you terrible deal for the government but you know find that that actually lasted for like a long time yeah there's guys that got millions of miles from this that's almost a form of extreme couponing there's a guy named David Phillips and this is a very famous case of extreme couponing with the with the advantage program from American Airlines this guy manufactured you know more than a million miles so healthy

choice which for those of you outside of the uniform outside of the US is a brand of very unhealthy frozen food here are the United States it's a they ran a promo where you could get a certain number of points for every 44 proof of purchase of every healthy choice product that you want and so you had to mail like the the UPC symbol which is like the the barcode on the package and it turns out that there's one healthy choice product they missed that was really really cheap it's like a 25 cent carton of pudding that actually has like a cardboard overlay and a UPC symbol you could tear off so uh this is an old case

like this was from 2000 just before two thousand and so David went around to all of his local stores and said that he was stocking up for y2k and he bought her like every single pallet of healthy choice pudding he could get his hands on he you know tore off all the UPC symbols sent them in and he was able to get more than a million miles for doing this the best part of all is he donated the pudding to his local food bank and was able to get a tax deduction for what he spent so you know this is a this is a you know basically like that's a form of extreme couponing now this one got

famous because it was so big and so creative but there are smaller opportunities did you Extreme Couponing all the time because there are all these frequent flyer programs that allow you two to get X you know additional miles for spending in certain categories often through short shopping portals from a company called cartera so alaska airlines has mileage plan shopping for example for a while totally shut this down after I believe it lasted a week you could get by american express gift cards with no fee and 10 x 10 points per dollar spent so you know american express gift cards aren't quite cash it's hard to turn those into cash you actually have to use the amex gift cards to buy something

else that you can then turn into cash but you know by the time you get done like the number of miles and points that you could get if you hit this really hard it was you know like a fairly insane amount and you know that's something that happened a month and a half ago so these things happen all the time you just need to look very carefully think like a hacker and when there is an opportunity jump on it right away and that's that's actually something that I hope that you guys will think about like for anything involving an airline if there's a good deal right now don't wait don't think don't consider don't talk to people just buy

it right now do it right now because if it's a good deal right now like the moment that the airline figures had it's a good deal it's not going to be there so mileage runs I'll show you guys to slide in a minute you know that will explain the mileage runs in a little more detail but it's basically taking extra flights to get more miles without paying more and finally by miles promos so airlines also miles for example right now there's a promo Tobiah vianka miles but avianca announced the devaluation of their program they're actually like making the miles less value by and how by how much nobody knows they're not saying so hey you know they're they've

given some examples of where they're going to adjust the award chart but nobody knows exactly how much they're going to devalue this program so you know you're buying a pig in a poke unless you plan to redeem the miles immediately so by miles programs are basically super risky I wouldn't do it unless you have an immediate plan to use the miles right now but in general don't hold on two miles use them right now they always drop in value so credit cards you know I just want to like underscore that when you're dealing with credit cards they're really deal with the devil most of the most the most lucrative bonuses are with credit cards but there's like typically minimum

spend requirements you got to spend a certain amount of money in a limited period of time so you have to like stay on top of when you need to do that and make sure you do it or you've just you know lost the annual fee potentially and not gotten anything for it and you know you should consider how to meet the minimum spend in some unconventional ways if you don't actually want to do that amount of spending so don't go out and buy stuff you don't need just to hit a bonus that's like that's that's just bad finance it's going to cost you more in the long run so you know if you don't manage this and stay on top of it really

well and you know I'm talking to a really smart audience here right so you know this is maybe something I don't need to tell you guys but it's you know banks make most of their money through people making horrible financial decisions and you know it just happens to all of us at some point that we've gotten screwed by a bank so if you don't manage this way you're going to end up paying far more than the value of the miles and actually that's how banks make their money they count on this so I myself am a big fan of free miles I really like free it's easy to get caught up in this and then you know you find

out that you've got three platinum cards with five hundred dollar annual fees each and you just kind of wonder how that happened and you know don't get caught up in the miles like get caught up in in the travel because that's the thing that I think is the most important so mileage runs what makes a mistake fair even better you can combine it with a mistake routing and what that'll do is get you more miles so mistake fares will will still earn miles the mistake round-the-world trip I'm making is earning me miles to do it it's getting harder to do mileage runs profitably but it's still possible and what do I mean by it's getting hard to do them

profitably well um airlines are changing their frequent flyer programs to be based more on what you spend in southwest and jetblue or two examples of airlines where you know their frequent flyer program gives you credit based on what you're spending is as opposed to the amount of travel that you do united and delta are doing the same thing next year for now American and alaska airlines are sticking with the traditional mileage-based program so you can you know and you know through the end of 2014 you can still milk united and delta for what they're worth it's still possible to do mileage run so do keep a you know to keep an eye out for good fares to places that you want to go

and then see if you can add in extra segments to get more miles the flight deal calm like that's a great site to look at I love that site for finding exceptionally low fares to different parts of the world I went to Ecuador for under four hundred dollars on a tip that they found me and flyertalk com there's a forum there and there's a it's called mileage run and a lot of people in that mileage run forum will post some incredible deals so you might also want to have a look so um some pitfalls to my Lara runs you know I already talked about this there's revenue-based changes to flyer programs coming soon it's more

expensive to get miles this way than to get at them other ways what do I mean by that well you're buying airfare and you're flying like you know that's always more expensive than spending on a credit card or something like that I you know your butt has to be in the seat for all those segments so you know if you're going to fly to like Tokyo and turn around and fly back you know that's 20 hours in a plane and yes you earn the miles and they may have been a really cheap but do you actually want to do that like you know you're going to be wedged in economy that whole way it may

not be much fun um and finally you know don't get caught up in the miles and that's that's a really important thing you know some people like really love this game and that they you know they want to get the high score and you know remember why we do this it's to be able to go awesome places and see stuff there's a guy who posted about going to Australia turning around in the Sydney Airport and flying back from Australia just to get the miles and you know of course the Australia he was worried you know what the Australian Immigration and Customs was going to think they we thought the same thing I do this guy

is insane you want all the way to Australia without seeing a single kangaroo like that's just dumb don't do that um so mileage run picture just so you can kind of wrap your head around what I mean so here's an example of a trip that you could combine aeromexico and delta on so if you can combine a delta on with an arrow Mexico skyteam itinerary you could potentially round through all of the Delta hubs if you wanted to so the first routing is a direct routing which is like LAX to Mexico City on delta and then Mexico City to Quito on aeromexico and that would be like a conventional routing well you can get almost double the

number of miles if you were to go like to LA to Salt Lake to Seattle to Minneapolis to Atlanta to Mexico City and then on from there a taquito your butt's going to be really sore at the end of all that it's it's not going to be a whole lot of fun but you would get double the miles and it may not cost you more than just the extra segments taxes so you know consider whether there is an opportunity to add in more segments if you want to earn more miles it can be a very cheap way to do this but it can also be not a lot of fun so do actually factor that as well do you want to spend

your limited amount of time off you know sitting in an airplane instead of seeing where you want so free one way some airlines are going to allow you to book international travel with the stopover and if you this is on award tickets right so if you can do that that's an awesome opportunity because the stopover can be like for pretty much as long as you want to do so a few weeks ago I was in New York for a conference called hope the 2600 does hackers on planet earth and I actually like that ticket that i took to hope was an extension of a trip that started in china because i actually booked a ticket from kunming in china

it's like it's in Yunnan near to at to Hong Kong and then I went from there to Los Angeles right but why stop there why not do a stopover if you know you're going to be traveling on from LA somewhere sometime like why not actually add that trip as part of the itinerary right so that's exactly what I did I added on a segment to Vancouver and then on to JFK like now why would I route through Canada to get to JFK like that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense right well the reason why I dead is because that's what was available because it can be very very hard to find frequent flyer itineraries so consider

unconventional ways of getting somewhere turns out the cafe pacific which is a hong kong-based airline runs one flight a day from vancouver to JFK and they have the veil ability fairly often in Alaska Airlines which is an American Airlines partner has applied directly from LA to Vancouver so and it lines up nicely and you can connect so why not play through Canada to get somewhere in the u.s. you can totally get away with doing that as long as one of the carrier's on the route is a us-based carrier otherwise you're doing something called cabotage which you know I wrote about on my website that can get you in a lot of trouble if you book that if you

succeed in booking it because it can get the airline fine so you might find that you've you've had you've had trouble so no trips between points in the US on a foreign airline but if you've got one u.s. segment us to foreign segments involved then it's no problem so that's exactly what I did and it totally worked why not plan a free one way the next time the you book a freaking fire ticket so hidden cities you can get off the plane in a transfer city so what that means is if you're flying to for example Guam and you're leaving from LA and your trip goes via Tokyo because that's how a lot of trips to Guam are routed you then

have an LA to Tokyo and Tokyo to Guam itinerary well what if it was 25,000 miles to go to Guam and it was 35,000 miles to go to Tokyo I mean you could just booked a ticket to Guam and get off in Tokyo and a lot of people do this right so the problem is this isn't without risk because through Tokyo is not the only way to get to Guam you could actually be routed through Honolulu and onward so if there's something that goes wrong with the with your itinerary in the meantime you know for example like say that the flight to Tokyo gets canceled like the airline may just re route you and they're not going

to re-route you to your connecting city they're going to rewrite you to your final destination which means that you may find yourself on the way to Honolulu instead of on the way to Tokyo which isn't exactly what you planned so I don't actually recommend you make you know if you do this oh and the other thing is the airline's totally going to know what you did so it can be risky they could decide that you violated the terms of the frequent flyer program and take away your miles they usually don't but maybe they do so you know it's not without risk to do this consider whether the risk is worth while you know life miles with avianca like they didn't know

where one was I guess they're not very good with u.s. geography so they thought that Guam was part of the continental US and they were charging a 25 thousand mile round trip when it should be like 50,000 miles and you know routing you through Tokyo or Taipei to do it that deal is now dead but it is something you were able to do for a while there are many more tricks like this many many many more tricks like this hidden cities are definitely something you can exploit just be careful if you do so call to action and then I'll get back really quickly to some more you know I know a lot of you guys wanted to hear some more

details on you know before we have this microphone problem on unexecuted due to hack Ferris with fuel dumps so cost isn't a real barrier to travel anymore it really isn't like if you promote developed western country it's just it's completely affordable to visit almost anywhere on the planet so people in this room have a really unique perspective and I think that that's super important the you know the the perspective that we have on the kinds of problems that people have with technology and how we can solve them is something that's exceedingly valuable and I don't think I can overstate that I mean you know basically if you know there are very few people who have the

level of technical talent that we do and who can actually put all the pieces together to see the kinds of ways that we can actually help but you've got to get out there you've got to go actually see the problems people are having you've got to see where we can help with technology you've got to see where you can fit and where you can do your part or actually all of that goes to waste and you end up working for some giant corporation to to work on a security problem when actually you could be working on a creativity problem that could improve the lives of millions of people and that's something that I've learned through my travels you know

having visited all seven continents I've seen so many problems that you know that I alone can't solve and if the people in this room really started to get out more I think that there's no limit to what we as hackers could do to make the world a better place so with that I'd like to invite you to have a look at my website which is all about travel hacking and and some travel techniques and tips and hints it's called 31 be calm which references that terrible seat in the back of the plane that you're going to get if you are traveling for free most travel blogs that you're looking at are just trying to sell you a credit card so

you know there can be great information out there don't don't think that there isn't but at the same time you know do keep in mind like that that's how they make their money and that's how they pay the bills I'm not doing this for commercial reasons and doing this because I'm very passionate about the subject there are no ads and I endo affiliate links on my site so I think that you can find you know what you find there is probably trustworthy so back to pricing engines because this is something that I know a lot of you are trying to think about how to script already I'll give you guys an example of something you can do that's called a

third strike so suppose that you want to fly from Las Vegas to where somebody give me an interesting place to go no that's not like it has to be out of the out of North America uh well who says who thinks nobis kosha is in the North America you fail a geography okay I I heard Taipei that's that's cool i like taipei a lot they have a review tall building there anywhere else a Katmandu cam man dude okay that's that's the most interesting place that I've heard let's I haven't been there actually so we're going to Nepal great so Katmandu so you want to go to Kathmandu and you find that there is a fair to Katmandu on who

the hell even flies to Katmandu Air India sure why not Air India and let's say air india hates paying taxes you know do you like paying taxes like none of us like paying taxes right airlines don't either so they have a fair to Katmandu from New York and it costs so it's like new york deli deli Katmandu right and and the same in reverse and the fair is an incredible fair it's $35 each way with the 472 dollar fuel surcharge um and guess who air india just joined they just joined the Star Alliance which means that you can combine their fares with any other Star Alliance carrier of which there is also a carrier called United you may have

heard of them so what's a third strike you book new york deli deli Katmandu and the same in reverse and then three weeks later you book an inter-island flight from honolulu to Maui ununited this forces the fair to be priced through the Star Alliance pricing engine which doesn't account for fuel surcharges which then drops off that 472 dollar each wave fuel surcharge leaving you with a fair of seventy dollars plus your homeland security entry fee and all your applicable segments taxes and whatever the Indians in the and the police want to charge you so you end up paying like you know 150 bucks or something to go to Kathmandu that technique was called the pineapple poke

lots of people were poking a lot of pineapples unfortunately it like it started there were so many people poking pineapples that it started having like a fairly serious impact on the load factors of the inter-island flights in Hawaii like there were just all these people not showing up and so United started investigating why that was and they uncovered you know what people were doing which is why the pineapple poke no longer works but imagine that you find something that is a flight within the same Alliance that's in a different continent and it's something that you can add as that that's a really cheap fare to add because the way this works is it just you know it adds on another

fairer and it you know and ends up breaking the whole fair construction right so let's suppose for sake of argument and this argument is not a valid one so you know so this is just an example suppose there's a great fair you found for 50 bucks from Guam to Palau it'll never happen but they're close by that's and you found that on United because they do fly there that's another example of something you could add on so nobody interestingly enough has scripted any of this and you know there's like a whole a whole bunch of logic that could be scripted to find third strikes and so that's something that could be you know potentially very interesting these

things don't work for domestic trips so let's add another technique called a first strike similar to a third strike except that you're hopping a border and you're doing it with the first hop of a flight so if you're somebody like me who used to live in Seattle that's not far from Vancouver or Victoria so you could start out from Vancouver or Victoria going somewhere within you know from from North America to the from Canada through the US and then onward to a third country outside of the North American continent and you could end up dropping a fuel surcharge that way that you know air canada was super vulnerable to this and so many people were taking advantage that you

know finally they fixed it for the most part it's not a hundred percent fix but for the most part it's fixed now the problem with the first strike is you actually have to show up for the first leg of your trip so like these third strikes are great because you can book them between like two cities in India for example and like never show up and it doesn't matter you know and have it like you know month later like after your trip is already complete you know it's like basically like there's no impact on you if they cancel the end of your itinerary so what you're already where you want to be for a first strike

you have to show up for the first leg so that means if you're like from Buffalo you have to drive the Toronto and and fly from there you know it's not really practical for most people but these things you know because it's not practical for most people like there's a ton of ton of really bad stuff you can do from Tijuana so you know keep that in mind great so with that I'm the last talk of the day I think so I have probably as long as I want for questions if you guys have any questions and thanks for being a very patient and attentive audience [Applause] is there a microphone that people can that can be passed around questions or

anything there okay hey

beer okay so for the benefit of the video the question is the gentleman lives in remote a remote part of Wisconsin with a very small airport but there is commercial air service there and the fairest tend to be much higher from this Airport than going to Chicago or Milwaukee where there's more competition so he's wondering how do you how do I fly for a reason for a reasonable price from my small airport in my hometown and that's like actually really big you know a really important question for a lot of people in America because the sexual air service subsidy which has been bringing air service too many many smaller communities around the country has been

cut back in recent years as the US