Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Premium: Travel Hacking 101

Transcript

Premium: Travel Hacking 101 · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day, this is an abridged version of the episode that you can hear in full by signing up
• 0:04
  at uncomfortableconversations.substac.com slash subscribe. Enjoy the freebie.
• 0:13
  I had breakfast yesterday at a fancy place and it was a dollop of scrambled eggs,
• 0:19
  some sad bacon, a pretty juicy fatty little sausage and a large thing of sourdough.
• 0:27
  And until you actually really know what calories there are in things,
• 0:31
  everyone just thinks that the sourdough is just, you know, it's just there for decorations,
• 0:34
  so you might have a little eat it. The sourdough's got a lot of calories in it.
• 0:37
  Mmm.
• 0:37
  Who needs a sourdough?
• 0:39
  Yeah, toss it into the side of the plate.
• 0:41
  Have the stuff with flavor. Even the sad bacon had more flavor than the sourdough.
• 0:44
  Yeah, that's true. Yeah, a few calories.
• 0:48
  I think it's important to point out as well your dedication to choosing calories wisely.
• 0:54
  As the other weekend, when I went to a bakery with you, I've seen, I've not witnessed
• 1:00
  you in this capacity joint that we went to a bakery. Yeah.
• 1:04
  And you ate five pastries, just without stopping. You didn't take the time to stop chewing.
• 1:11
  Well, I stopped to get up and buy it to buy some of those after having it in three of them.
• 1:15
  But you had, what did you have? You had like three savory style croissants and two sweet ones.
• 1:20
  There was a, so they do these. It is the most amazing bakery probably in the world.
• 1:26
  Yeah, crack and sourdough.
• 1:28
  Crack and sourdough. And they do. I knew that they did a like a marinated mushroom
• 1:34
  brioche. So it's like puffy pastry with like creamy mushroom deliciousness in the middle.
• 1:42
  And so soft and moist all the way over. So I got one of those and then I couldn't not get one of
• 1:49
  croissants with a kimchi. It was a kimchi spicy kimchi croissant. I thought that looked interesting.
• 1:56
  And then I knew that their jam donuts would be good. So I got those. And then after that,
• 2:00
  I think I needed to go back for a, you got one of the custard and berry tart.
• 2:04
  Oh, that's right. There was a little custard and berry tart. And there was a Danish.
• 2:07
  That's right. There was a Danish, someone mentioned a rhubarb Danish. And I got a rhubarb Danish
• 2:12
  and a little custard and berry tart. But it was a, it was a site to be holed, Josh.
• 2:17
  When I do stop chewing, I go. I really, really appreciated the dedication with which you put away
• 2:24
  those delicious. I love it. I love it. And see, then, yeah, so for the rest of the day,
• 2:28
  don't really need to eat much. I mean, you're in a food coma after that. You've just, you've just had
• 2:32
  3000 calories. Absolutely. So you were asleep for the next eight hours. And then you have a
• 2:37
  bit of a, a bit of a meal. And then the next day, you don't eat quite so much. Yeah. Yeah,
• 2:41
  it's all right. You make up for it on other days. But let's get onto what we're here to talk about,
• 2:45
  Josh. We could talk about food until the cows come home. But I think that as a part of our
• 2:50
  getting to know Josh series, one part of you, which I don't know anything about. And I don't
• 2:55
  think our listeners know much about unless they've listened to you on some obscure aviation mileage
• 3:01
  podcast of which they're all listening. It's called dots, miles and destinations. I think
• 3:07
  is a podcast that appeared on a couple of times. My guys, you're listening. Shout out to dots and
• 3:14
  miles. No, dots, lines and destinations. Okay. The dot is the city. The line is the flight
• 3:19
  route between the two cities and the destination is I guess the destination. Wow. Fascinating stuff.
• 3:26
  So Josh has this secret life of being a aviation flight points slash mileage hacker. Is that
• 3:35
  how to describe a travel hacker? I mean, it rarely comes up that I need to describe myself in
• 3:40
  this capacity, but a travel hacker, which dovetails nicely with eating five delicious pastries?
• 3:44
  Because there's no, no better place to eat five delicious pastries than in first class on
• 3:48
  Singapore Airlines or something. That's good. Let's get to that. Singapore Airlines. I think
• 3:52
  just got number one in the recent list. Did you read that list? No, those lists are bullshit,
• 3:56
  but that's fine. Okay. You're allowed to have a list. All right. Well, look, they are very good,
• 4:00
  though. I mean, they'd be right up there. Yeah. Yeah. Singapore are up there. It's hard.
• 4:04
  Kwanis has been a shit airline for decades, and I don't know. It's interesting. Kwanis is a,
• 4:12
  it's one of the, yeah, I don't know. It's one of those captive market situations where
• 4:15
  if you have a lot of corporate and government contracts and you have good marketing and you can
• 4:20
  sort of coast on people's preconceptions or like, you know, fond memories of you, then
• 4:26
  and people are just really stupid when it comes to travel. I mean, there are a lot of people
• 4:31
  who will just buy Kwanis because they think, well, because they're Australian and they go,
• 4:36
  I'll just fly Kwanis. Yeah. I mean, do you think that they're stupid or do you think that like me?
• 4:41
  I mean, am I stupid or I mean, I just can't be stuffed to look too deeply into into these things
• 4:49
  and how deeply is it? I don't know. You got a Google fly. Where do you want it? Where do you go?
• 4:54
  Wherever. Europe. Yeah. I look for like cheap. And if it's like, yeah,
• 4:59
  quantity is never cheap. If it's anything that's not China Southern or China Eastern,
• 5:04
  then I'm like, that's got to be all right. And I click on whatever is the most cost effective.
• 5:08
  That's great. I wholeheartedly condone that. That's never going to yield Kwanis.
• 5:12
  Right. Okay. Well, sometimes Kwanis is like, never. Well, I suppose the reason that
• 5:17
  anytime I would fly a Kwanis would be generally because my partner is sort of a point,
• 5:22
  Kwanis points person. Right. Yeah. Well, this is the other problem, I think. One reason why
• 5:27
  Kwanis does well is that they've got they've trapped Australians into the points into thinking
• 5:31
  that Kwanis points are useful for anything. There's one thing I'll preempt the points conversation.
• 5:36
  There's one thing that Kwanis points are useful for, which is a short haul economy class flights
• 5:42
  where, but only because Kwanis rapes you on the cash price of the ticket. So there are places like,
• 5:47
  for example, Lord Howe Island from Sydney where, you know, you'll pay over a thousand dollars
• 5:53
  return for a one-on-a-half hour flight on a propeller plane. It's absolutely ludicrous,
• 5:58
  but because the points are a per if you're using if you're using the points to buy an award
• 6:02
  seat, I wouldn't will come to this distinction in a moment, not using points as a form of currency,
• 6:07
  but if you're using them to redeem them on as for an award seat, then it's like four and a half
• 6:11
  thousand points or something, which is worth about 40 or 50 bucks for a flight that would otherwise
• 6:16
  cost five hundred dollars. So those little flights or like flying from our Adelaide to Port Lincoln
• 6:20
  or something like that, those are a good use, but if you ever want to actually fly anywhere in
• 6:24
  the world, Kwanis points are totally rubbish because you need a lot of points to redeem,
• 6:29
  you need an extraordinary number of points to redeem for business and first class,
• 6:32
  and you need a staggering amount of money to pay them in made-up fees that they tried to hide
• 6:38
  as if they were airport fees or some fee that's beyond their control, but are actually
• 6:43
  completely concocted and randomly invented and totally pulled out of their ass fees. I mean,
• 6:48
  you try to redeem your Kwanis points for things that they create, the allure to try to draw you
• 6:55
  in to keep you as a loyal freaking flyer customer like Emirates business class or something like that,
• 7:00
  the fees that they'll charge you to redeem your hundreds and hundreds of thousands of points
• 7:05
  on Emirates business class, which I could get for 80,000 American Airlines points, they'll then charge
• 7:12
  well in excess of $1,000 on top of your points. So don't go with Kwanis points, it's
• 7:19
  kind of slim pick in Australia, unfortunately. So if you're like me listeners and you don't understand
• 7:24
  anything about this points game, you can probably get a sense that Josh is kind of into this
• 7:28
  from that rant about Kwanis points, but I want to start from the start because I don't know
• 7:32
  anything, so you can give me the 101 on it, but firstly, so a point in miles synonymous?
• 7:39
  Yes, basically, when it comes to an airline program, they are. The reason why some people say
• 7:45
  miles instead of points is because there are other points currencies that like your credit card,
• 7:49
  you know, your bank might issue for your credit card that's not necessarily one-to-one, so there
• 7:54
  are things called American Express Membership Rewards, which is not a mile, it's a point.
• 8:01
  But in Australia, we tend to call frequent flyer points regardless of whether they're with an
• 8:05
  airline or somewhere else, and in the States, they tend to call airline miles and everything
• 8:11
  else points. Right. Okay. So where did you get this interest in aviation and travel hacking,
• 8:20
  but also is there something about a personality that sort of moves towards these sorts of things,
• 8:27
  and likes to participate in these types of schemes and systems? Well, I mean, you need to love flying.
• 8:33
  Yeah, so where did that start? Did you ever always love flying? I wanted to be a pilot when I was
• 8:37
  a kid. It wasn't until I was in my teens, and I realized that most of what pilots do is reasonably
• 8:42
  boring, and we'll get increasingly boring as technology gets better, that I realized I wanted
• 8:46
  to do something creative. But I've always loved planes. I've always thought they were incredible.
• 8:52
  I've always been an airplane nerd, but not so much in the sense of like, oh, you know,
• 8:59
  what's the difference between like assessment and 25 and like, you know, I'm not super, super
• 9:04
  into the engineering component, but I just think it's fucking amazing. And I'm interested in the
• 9:09
  business side of the, I'm interested in the customer experience side of it. I think it's super
• 9:14
  cool. Almost like a, you know, in a parallel life, I can imagine being a Disney Imagineer,
• 9:20
  who comes up with rollercoaster rides and theme park rides. I think that would be like a cool job.
• 9:25
  I think it's super cool to kind of challenge yourself to what is the, what is the biggest bang
• 9:31
  for the buck and the most kind of opulent and seamless and luxurious and pleasant way to do
• 9:38
  something that's fundamentally unpleasant, which is cut hundreds of people around in a steel tube.
• 9:44
  And so the ways in which different airlines can figure their seats and the amount of legroom
• 9:50
  that they willing to give you and how they're going to show you videos and what they're going to feed
• 9:55
  you in various classes of service, what, how extravagant the beds are going to be, whether or not
• 10:01
  you're going to get to shower at 34,000 feet, whether or not the lounge is going to have private
• 10:05
  cabanas where you can get free massages like, you know, who's, who's serving your caviar and in
• 10:12
  what class, you know, is there going to be a door on your suite or not? These are all just,
• 10:17
  it's just cool. It's a cool industry. It's a weird space. And the thing that makes it kind of
• 10:24
  excessively cool, rather than abstractly cool, is that there's this whole world of points that
• 10:30
  enable people who aren't rich to experience things that a tailor made for very, very rich people.
• 10:35
  And normally that's not possible. You can't, there's no way to finagle your way onto a super
• 10:40
  yacht and just have a super yacht for a week. Like you actually need money for that or friends.
• 10:44
  Yes. You know, and there's no way to have a palace without having a palace. But there is a way to
• 10:51
  live in a palace for a few nights using hotel points. And there is a way to fly like you're an
• 10:58
  near of some Middle Eastern country, but through points. So how does it work? What's, how did you get
• 11:04
  involved in this? How did you figure out what the best way is to live like a Sultan? Well, I mean,
• 11:09
  you start with blogs. So there are people, there are good, there are good blogs. There's, I think,
• 11:14
  I think my gateway guy was a guy called Ben Shlapig, who has a blog called One Mile at a time.
• 11:21
  People might be familiar with frequent Mylar. There are, I mean, you know, there are a number of
• 11:26
  blogs. There's Australian frequent flyer for people in Australia. But it just became
• 11:33
  obvious to me that it would be much more fun to fly in a bed being served amazing food than to
• 11:41
  be in an economy class. And so, and I'm, I kind of, I have the sort of brain that enjoys it. Like,
• 11:47
  there's no point in trying to do it if you don't enjoy it, I think. I mean, unless you have,
• 11:52
  I have a lot of friends who always want, who say that they want to do it. But they don't actually,
• 11:58
  they want someone else to do it for them so they can fly first class for free. But don't,
• 12:03
  but it, it, it, it lands for them as enough of a hassle that they can't be bothered.
• 12:08
  Then I have other friends who don't enjoy, but have a specific redemption that they want,
• 12:12
  that I can coach them through. So they really want to take the family on a trip to South America,
• 12:16
  but they can't afford $10,000 in airfares. And they know that they don't mind flying economy class.
• 12:21
  But they just want the points to do that. And then I can help them do that. And they can just
• 12:25
  build a little spreadsheet of what credit cards sign up bonuses. They're going to sign up for
• 12:28
  and, you know, when they're going to cancel the cards and then they get the points and then they
• 12:31
  redeem it and they've got their free $10,000 flight. For me, it's more like an ongoing
• 12:40
  game of Sudoku or an ongoing crossword. Like it's a game of arbitrage basically, you know,
• 12:45
  currency trading or Bitcoin trading or something like that. It's a, it's a, it's a constant life-long
• 12:51
  opportunity to acquire points for less than I can redeem them for, which is quite easy to do.
• 12:57
  And then redeem them for things that I would never otherwise spend money on.
• 13:00
  Right. And so where does one start? Is it about, is it the credit card sign ups and things like that?
• 13:06
  And, you know, I guess we've got to get on to. You've got to fly a certain amount to get
• 13:10
  get points as well and get stats. No, no, that's one way. That's one, I mean, yes, you need to
• 13:15
  fly to get status if you want status. But you didn't use to when I started out, your credit card
• 13:22
  spend was also counted towards. And I think with some American carriers, they've reintroduced
• 13:27
  this now. Yeah, I think American now does this that they, that loyalty points, which are now
• 13:32
  a separate, it's too arcane to bother explaining. But basically, you know, airlines have status,
• 13:39
  the free and fly programs have statuses in them. So when you, when you first join a free and
• 13:43
  fly a program, you're a nobody, but you're above, you know, you're above a nobody in their system.
• 13:48
  If something happens to the flight, the flight gets canceled, you need to be rebooked.
• 13:52
  You'll be treated better if you're a member of their free and fly program than if you're not.
• 13:55
  So the first rule would be just be a member of the free and fly program. Anyway,
• 13:59
  even if you don't have any status. And then you will have seen that if you fly 25,000 miles a year
• 14:05
  or something, you'll be silver and then 50,000 usually gold and then something like 100,000,
• 14:11
  you'll be platinum. There are different terms for some of these things. American Airlines calls
• 14:16
  gold platinum and calls platinum, executive platinum and things like that. But there are fundamentally
• 14:21
  three elite tiers from people who, for people who fly a lot that make life easier.
• 14:27
  Usually the midpoint of the tier, which is called gold on programs like Quantas and Virgin
• 14:33
  is the one where you actually get real benefits like you get to use the business class check-in
• 14:37
  counters. You get to use the lounge for free and you start to get those serious perks and
• 14:44
  priority tags on your bags so they come out first, those sorts of things.
• 14:48
  That's separate from redeemable points. So you don't have to have any status to get
• 14:54
  real points. I haven't had a lifetime gold status with American. So I'll never have to use a regular
• 15:01
  check-in counter again, which is great. But that doesn't get me any free flights.
• 15:07
  No. Right. That's just how you treat it when you're flying.
• 15:10
  The points, how do you get started? I mean, I think what people, I think what you need,
• 15:16
  first thing you need to know is that the airlines of the world are broadly organized into three
• 15:23
  big alliances, one world sky team and star alliance, and points with any of the airlines inside
• 15:32
  each alliance are redeemable on any of the airlines in that alliance. There are also other airlines
• 15:38
  that some some airlines will allow you to redeem their points on at various different rates.
• 15:43
  There are some weird funky programs for people who are more experienced that they might like to
• 15:49
  use like Alaska Airlines has an interesting free and fly program. Air Canada's aeroplane program
• 15:54
  is probably the best in the world at the moment and has the largest number of partners that you can
• 15:58
  redeem all on the same award charts and whatever. So once you understand that there are three
• 16:04
  alliances, so you're not necessarily just redeeming your airline points or miles on the airline that
• 16:11
  you're flying, then you also need to understand that airlines have different ways of charging you
• 16:19
  for your redemptions. Some airlines will have distance-based, oh before I say that,
• 16:24
  you also need to understand that there's such things in award seat. Yes.
• 16:28
  Right, so this is important. Yes. Each airline has different fare buckets. When they have a
• 16:35
  fair sale and you buy a cheap discount, like a contest will call it a red e-deal or something
• 16:40
  like that. There's a class that is represented by a code which is the fare that you're buying.
• 16:47
  It's not the class of service, it's not economy, premium economy, business or first. It'll be
• 16:50
  a little number, it'll be a letter on your ticket, right, end class or end class or something.
• 16:56
  Those, so all of the seats on the plane are divided into different fare buckets. If you walk
• 17:03
  up to the airport right now and you just buy a ticket on the next flight to Melbourne, almost all
• 17:08
  of the fare buckets will be sold. That's why you'll be paying $1,000 for that flight instead of $99
• 17:13
  for that flight because you're buying an expensive fare bucket. One of the fare buckets that is
• 17:18
  the cheapest and the quickest to be snapped up is the award class fare bucket. That's a certain
• 17:25
  number of seats per flight, which may be zero on some popular routes, which is allocated for
• 17:32
  exclusively for award redemptions. Most airlines will release at least one or two of those seats on
• 17:38
  every flight. Sometimes you get more, sometimes there are glitches and they open up a whole
• 17:42
  flight to whatever. Those are the only things you should ever use your points to redeem for.
• 17:48
  Most airlines try to rip you off by encouraging you to use your frequent flyer points on what
• 17:53
  looks like you're using it on a flight, but what's actually happening is they're just charging
• 17:56
  you the face value, the cash value of the seat, and they're buying back your frequent flyer points
• 18:01
  at a terrible price from you. So they'll often say, and you'll see that often when they have
• 18:07
  things like points plus pay or something like that. You can pay half the amount, but you can use
• 18:12
  your points for the other amount. If you actually calculate what they're buying the point back
• 18:16
  off you for, it's rubbish. So you're looking for award seats, and so some airlines will charge you
• 18:24
  according to a distance band, right? So a band airline like Quantess, or both Quantess and
• 18:30
  Virgin, airlines like British Airways, will generally just calculate the number of miles that you're
• 18:37
  flying, and there'll be, you know, 10 categories if you're flying, you know, zero to 400 miles for,
• 18:44
  you know, or between 400 to 1500 or whatever it is, and there'll be a chart that you can look at
• 18:48
  somewhere online in a colony class, business class, first class or whatever. However, there are
• 18:54
  other airlines that are more clever where you're able to get better value for longer haul flights,
• 18:59
  which is relevant for Australians since so much of our flying is long haul, which divide the world
• 19:04
  into a bunch of regions instead. And so then it's just, are you going between region A and region B's,
• 19:10
  there might be like four regions in the world, and then it's just a question of calculating,
• 19:16
  it's a much simpler thing, you don't need to know the mileage at all, and they'll often give you,
• 19:20
  you know, up to six stops, not a stop, but like a, you know, transit, which means a stop of less than
• 19:26
  24 hours as a general rule. And so you might be able to go from Broken Hill to, you know, some
• 19:36
  little town in Japan, and you could fly Broken Hill to Sydney, to Melbourne, to Osaka, to Tokyo,
• 19:43
  to the little town on Quantus and Japan Airlines. And if you were using Qantas points, you'd be
• 19:50
  telling up all of that mileage, and it would be quite a lot, new, quite an expensive redemption.
• 19:55
  But if you're using another one-world carrier like American Airlines, that would just be a South
• 20:02
  Pacific to Asia Zone One award, and it would make no difference, with the same amount of
• 20:09
  same prices sitting in Tokyo. Right. But you can only stop in each of these places for
• 20:13
  that. Yeah, that's right. I'm just, I'm just giving an example if you need it to do that in
• 20:17
  routing, right? Right. And that's when you get into mileage extensions for the purpose of
• 20:24
  status and things like that, right? Well, you don't earn status from award traffic.
• 20:28
  Okay. All right. So you could do, yes, you could do a mileage run on, so if there was a,
• 20:33
  there might be, sometimes be, if you want to, I think status running is for the birds at this stage,
• 20:39
  I don't think there's enough of a benefit to status anymore. Back in the day, yes, I would actually,
• 20:45
  like, I've done two paid around the world flights intentionally just to maximize the mileage
• 20:53
  to get top status when I was flying a lot in the States, like in the early 2010s and mid 2010s,
• 21:00
  because in the States, they upgrade you for free. If you have top, if you have any status,
• 21:05
  they upgrade you for free if there's a spare seat. And between New York and Los Angeles,
• 21:10
  they have really nice planes with like life, flat seats and everything. And it used to be the case
• 21:15
  10 years ago, that, if you have one,