Use credit cards. Get shacked somewhere awesome. Photo: Interwebs/ Callahan/surfEXPLORE
Free airfare is much better than expensive airfare. If you surf, travel is just part and parcel of the whole gig–surf trips are a rite of passage for anyone that slides around on those rolling, watery hills. Chances are that you don’t live in Indonesia or Hawaii (I know this because analytics shows me where you live and what colour your underwear is), and as such, you’d like to go there. The water is warm, the drinks are cold, and the waves are probably much better on most days than what you currently look at. So how can you score more trips without paying through the nose? A man named Brian Kelly knows because he does it better than anyone else. If you’re spending money anyway, you might as well reap all the rewards those crafty bastards at the credit card companies are dishing out.
Kelly used to work on Wall Street, and thankfully for me, because I am too lazy to call him myself and figure out the vagaries of credit card miles, the fine people over at Vice hollered at him for a few tips on how to game the airfare system. Kelly’s a bit of a travel guru–in fact, after Wall Street, he’s made a living by starting up a blog that shows people how to rack up points without really even noticing that they’re doing it. In doing so, he kicked off a movement that’s being called “travel hacking.” All you’ve got to do is use your credit cards wisely, which is usually easier said than done.
According to Vice, Kelly makes his money by posting advertisements for credit cards on his website, which is ironic but great, in a stick-it-to-the-man kind of way. When Vice reporter Allie Conti caught up with him, he’d just returned from a trip stopping in Ghana, Rwanda, and South Africa. I don’t know about Rwanda, but between Ghana and South Africa, there are waves aplenty. And get this: the airfare cost him $5.60. Yup, the decimal is in the right place. Five dollars and sixty cents. Instead of stealing the entire interview from Vice, I’m going to sum up what he told them in a few brief points:
1. Pay off your shit:
When Conti told Brian that her credit score wasn’t all that great–a predicament that pretty much everyone finds themselves in–he told her the first step to getting the right credit card is getting decent credit. “You’re fine,” he told her, after she told him her credit score was at 580. “It’s probably just because you have a relatively short credit history and a lot of credit, so you’re high-risk. But once you pay that off—I’m not kidding, in one month it can shoot up 50, 100 points.”
2. Choose your cards wisely.
According to Kelly, the kind of credit cards you want are the ones that allow you to transfer your points. Basically, when you get points, they go into a “central pool.” From there, you can redeem them in a whole bunch of different ways. With airline credit cards, you’re basically putting all your eggs in one basket. “Would you put your entire life savings into Apple stock?” Kelly asked. “Just because it did great last year, it could tank this year, and then you’d be screwed.” Airline credit cards only allow you to use the points with their airline, so your points are dictated by their prices, which are dictated by a drunken monkey pointing at random numbers on a feces-smeared chalkboard.
“Delta overnight will be like, ‘OK, now it’s twice as much to get to Asia.'” Kelly explained. “And people are like, ‘What the fuck? I’ve been saving up for like, four years.’ And so the airlines will move the goalpost. But if you’re in an AmEx program—AmEx has 20-something other partners–you can say, ‘I don’t even want to go with Delta, I want to use some of the other partners to go to Asia.’ So it’s really about diversifying.”
Kelly’s number one recommendation? The Chase Sapphire Preferred, which offers two points per dollar spent on all travel and dining. That means for every dollar you spend on airfare, food, hotels, cars, subways, horse and carriage… pretty much anything to do with living, you get two points. Decent, right?
3. No annual fees might not be in your best interest:
If you’re financially skimming by on the seat of your pants like a lot of people, getting a card that doesn’t grease its palms with your hard earned money for doing basically nothing can be very tempting. But it’s not always the best option, especially if you’re looking for points-heavy cards. “Cheap is expensive,” Kelly said. “These no-annual-fee cards are bullshit, for the most part.” Kelly says that the Chase Sapphire Preferred card gives you bonus points just for signing up, which sounded awesome, so I looked it up. If you spend $4000 in the first three months, they’ll give you 50,000 points. And like I said, if you’re going to spend it anyway, you might as well make the interest-reapers give you everything you can take.
4. Look for points and perks:
Kelly has a lot of credits cards he doesn’t even use, just for the perks. He told Vice that he has a Delta Airline credit card just because it gives him a free bag. Since he travels more than twice a year, that perk pays for itself. Another great example? “The Hyatt credit card,” he said, “gives you a free night every year, and it’s $75. So I get a free $250 night and it’s $75. I’ll do that every time.”
5. Think about getting an extra credit card:
Being in debt sucks, and having more than one credit card can be a recipe for disaster. In fact, just one can be a recipe for disaster, but that’s the world we live in. Kelly found a card called the Starwood Preferred Guest, which is an AmEx hotel card. The points you make with it are transferable to 34 different airlines–and for every 20,000 points you use on an airline, they’ll give you 25,000 airlines miles. “When you think about this,” Kelly said, “you’re getting a built-in 1.25 airline miles per dollar spent, which is 25 percent better than the airline cards themselves.” Talk about a loophole, right?
Kelly has found a way to play a system that is inherently pretty shitty. The western world is a debt-soaked consumer-driven society, and having a credit card has become something of a necessary evil. But not everyone wants one, and the credit card companies know this. That’s why they offer these things: so you that you’ll give them money for giving you money. So if you’re going to put it on plastic, you might as well do it right and hop on a plane to some far-flung, wave-rich destination for free… or $5.60.
Read the Vice interview in its entirety here: How to Travel the World for Free
