ABC News recently met some everyday travellers who have found ways to literally around the world in first class luxury for next to nothing. And if that sounds to good to be true, maybe that’s because you’ve never seen the extreme measures these folk are willing to take to rack up frequent flyer miles – those bonus points you get from all kinds of places that allow to fly for a discount or for free.
Rick Ingersoll gets to travel practically for free whenever he goes flying, to the front of the line at the check in counter, to the first class lounge, to the first class or business class seats at the front of the airplane. And the places he and his wife have gone to this year include, “We flew from Savannah to Athens then we flew to Dubrovnik in Croatia, and we spent some time there, then onto Split – also in Croatia, then up to Amsterdam and back, all in business class.”
The total cost of this trip was just the tax, so US$60 each…plus 120,000 frequent flyer miles each, which sounds impossibly high, but not when you’re what Rick is, a frequent flier millionaire, and one that wants to teach the rest of us a few tricks on how to be that kind of millionaire also.
For instance, did you know you could miles by the millions without ever flying? The first method Rick recommends is cashing in on credit card bonuses. Lots of banks now offer new credit card holders sign up bonuses of 20,000 or 40,000 sometimes 70,000 miles or points. The more cards you sign up for, the more points you get, even though most require you to spend at least a few thousand dollars first.
“Everybody thinks that applying for this many cards wrecks your rating, but it really doesn’t,” Rick tells ABC News. “Every time you apply for a credit card, they do what’s called an ‘inquiry on your credit report’ and it costs between two and five points on your credit score…so it’s not a big hit on your score.”
Still, Rick teaches that people who have shaky credit or cannot pay their bills in full each month or are applying for a mortgage in the near future should not be playing this game. In the fraternity of extreme frequent flyers, it’s controversial that any of these secrets are getting out, but Rick started a travel blog called the Frugal Travel Guy for the common man and he’s holding seminars regularly to more than 500 people – all sorts of people, people who will get on a plane and just fly around all weekend just to maximise their mileage and to raise their elite status with an airline.
“One day I flew from Austin to Dallas to Orange County, California…left the airport, spent five hours with my relatives, then got back on a plane and flew to O’Hare, Then Frankfurt in Germany, sat in a lounge for an hour, then from Frankfurt back to O’Hare and back to Austin,” said Bob Dashman, an attendee at one of Rick’s seminars.
These are called mileage runs or you could try what’s called a ‘mattress run’ also known as a hotel bonus. Lots of hotel chains offer bonuses that can be converted into airline miles or free hotel nights. Of course this can also get extreme when people like Win Schaeffer, co-organiser of the Mileage Seminar, hear about the Hampton Inn offering a bonus for each separate stay in a short period of time.
“I took my son to Disney World and we hopped from hotel to hotel every night, 13 days, 13 stays. So we switched hotel every night.”
The third method is the car rental bonus. Typically you get a few hundred points for a one or two-day car rental, but when one company raised the bonus to 10,000 for a one-day rental, George Smart went to his local airport and rented almost every car off the lot.
“I rented about 12 or 15 cars in a morning and I would get maybe 60 to 100 thousand miles for a very inexpensive investment. That’s the equivalent of going to Europe on discount…twice.”
Rick explains to ABC News that he went to China for 10 days, flying from Chicago to Beijing. “We went to see the Great Wall of China, we saw the Terracotta Warriors and then we flew to Shanghai and then flew home. And again, it didn’t cost us anymore than the taxes, $150 in total. In business class.”
That’s the equivalent of 110,000 frequent flyer miles, each. This of course also gets you into the business class lounge at the airport. And it’s Rick’s view that you can be there. You can be this kind of millionaire.
Extreme, perhaps, but only the tip of the iceberg in terms of techniques talked about at Rick’s seminar, which quite frankly take a lot of work and a lot of study, but in Rick’s view when you’re settled back in the comfortable chair of business class it really seem worth it.
Scott Snowden
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