Things I Love: Making Travel Easier

Here's a few apps that I sure love. Interspersed with some fotos of life in December, all except the last courtesy of Val (just to keep you entertained).  Enjoy!

Autoslash.com
It's a rental car search site. You put in your location and dates, and it presents you with a bunch of choices. You choose whatever fits your needs. Then, it checks every day to see if there's a lower rate, and if so, automatically re-books you. For my recent trip to San Diego, we had a three day rental that started out at $65, and through three effortless rebookings ended up at $31! Thats $10 a day.

Chili-night at our house with friends

Yapta.com
Val told me about this one. When you buy a plane ticket, you put in your flights, and the price you paid. Yapta checks every hour to see if there's a lower fare, and if your airline has a low price guarantee. We're headed to CO this Spring and I input our flight information a week ago. Last night, Yapta emailed to let me know the price had dropped $40/person and that I should call Alaska ASAP. In a less than 5 minute call with a very friendly agent, we got $80 back!

Bravehorse Tavern to celebrate another year of my life..

TripIt.com
You give them your email address, and they automatically scan your email for anything that looks like a reservation. When they find something, they import it, and automatically file together everything that goes in one trip. Your plane, train, hotel, car, tour (+ weather and activities) all in one place with the confirmation numbers, contact phone numbers, etc. Not only does it help me keep myself organized, but I can send all the info to an interested husband or worried mother with the click of a mouse.

Black, white & bling NYE party

Matt's spiffy Vietnam suit

Awardwallet.com
You put in your user names and passwords once for all of your mile/point accounts, and it tracks them all in one place! No more remembering 800 usernames, and wondering if you earned those points for...whatever. They do frequent flyer programs, credit cards, survey rewards, rental cars, you name it.

EvReward.com
Thinking of making an online purchase? Chances are that no matter how obscure the retailer is some airline will give you miles for it. Type in the retailer here, and they'll tell you who all will give you points, and how many per dollar so you can maximize. I got thousands of miles for my Christmas shopping!

A sad morning. Saying goodbye to Markus, the day before he heads back to Germany.

Obviously, I love TripAdvisor, Kayak, TravelZoo, and many of the other big names. But these were some slightly more obscure ones. Here's to cheaper, easier travel!

Frequent Flyer Miles 101

Alright, as promised, here are some free/cheap/fairly easy mile earning activities.

I am definitely not a proponent of applying for every good credit card offer out there, or of carrying balances on your card. However, life does require the spending of money and you might as well get something for it!! Pick a good mileage earning credit card, stick to it, and put every penny you spend on it. Using cash is a wasted opportunity. A few of my favorites:

American Airlines card with 75,000 bonus miles. Best sign-up bonus around right now if you are looking for a quick way to make a lot of miles. This link takes you to the application, this link has a good explanation.

British Airways Visa. 50,000 mile sign up bonus, 1.25 miles/dollar spend (every other card is 1 mile/dollar) and no foreign transaction fees. Best way to get to Asia on the fewest miles. My friends just went to SE Asia for 50,000 (see their great blogging of it here) and I just booked my parents business class to Vietnam for 100,000 each (thats a $7,000 ticket).

Continental card. Usually between 30-40,000 miles for signing up but they definitely have the best partners around that fly the most places and have the most seats available, especially if you are interested in going to Europe.

Alaska Airlines Visa. Only 25,000 miles for signing up but comes with a $99 companion ticket every single year. For only $99 you can bring someone with you on any Alaska/Horizon flight, which is an awesome deal if you fly to Hawaii or Mexico or somewhere else where flights are expensive.



Non-Credit Card Deals*

Chase Bank just got rid of an offer for 25,000 miles each for a business and personal account that you could do every single year. That got us to Morocco and First Class to Mexico City last year. They just discontinued it b/c is was Continental  miles and they are merging with United but I'm pretty sure they'll be bringing back something new in the near future. I'll keep you updated.

Citibank has a checking account you get 20,000 miles for opening. It has a $6,000 minimum balance, which is kind of a bummer and it takes about 6 mos to get all the miles, but if you have that $$ sitting around somewhere else anyway then this is a great way to earn 20,000 miles for it.

The following are all smaller mileage opportunites but either free or very cheap and every bit helps!

Sharebuilder gives around 2000 miles for opening an account on a number of different airlines. It's a free account, you can invest as little as $5 in any stock/mutual fund you want and you get miles! Put a little money in, get some miles, forget about it, and come back in six months and (hopefully) realize you made some $$ off it too! Continental, Alaska, check your airlines website for more 

If you happen to be signing up for Netflix anyway (or perhaps cancel, and re sign up?) a number of airlines offer around 2000 for signing up. American, Delta, United, try google for more.

Dining programs. Most airlines have a dining program where you just register your credit cards, and then when you eat somehwere and use those cards you automatically get somewhere between 5-10 miles for every $$ you spend. There's actually a number of restaurants on there that I go to anyway, so I just register my cards and then every once in a while find that I got 300 miles for eating out. Neat. Alaska, American, check your airline's website for more.

AA is giving 800 miles right now for trying Safeway's home delivery. Your first order is free delivery, so it saves you a trip to the grocery store, and gets you 800 miles.

If you are someone that is an Aunt/Uncle/friend of my parents/other person that has more money than most people my age: Fidelity and TD Ameritrade give up to 50,000 miles for investing with them. If you do this anyway this can be a pretty sweet deal, they are free accounts, you can transfer stocks directly so that you don't have to actually buy/sell, and there is no time restriction for how long you need to keep the $$ there. Continental, American, American, check the website of your airline for more.

There are zillions of other great deals out there. I can't list them all. If you want to really get into this a) look on the airlines website where you already have some miles accumulated, they have lots of great deals listed on there and b) check out flyertalk.com . FlyerTalk is a community of people who like to fly/travel and have strange obsessions with miles. Some of them may be certifiably insane based on the lengths they go to in order to get miles but they have so so many great ideas. Browse the MilesBuzz forum to keep up with all the latest and greatest.

Also, pick an airline or two, and stick to it. It doesn't help you at all to have 10,000 miles scattered around with each airline. Think about which pleaces you are interested in going to, browse websites to see which airlines have partners that fly which places and how many miles it takes to get each place and pick what seems right for you.

*Please read the fine print on the actual websites for all these offers. Sometimes they have weird details and I have not attempted to list every little detail of the promotion here, but I have tried these all myself and promise they work and are not too crazy.




We spent some time last week at my parents house in Olalla while they are down in Mexico. We got really lucky with some beautiful weather and a nice full moon and low tide for a beach walk. It was so bright out that the last couple pictures were taken at almost midnight and my shutter speed wasn't even all that slow.

(you can't see him very well, but this is my seal friend who kept me company while Matt was at work)

So you guys can't all be mad at me again

Back in December/January British Airways had a great promotion where they had a credit card with a 100,000 mile sign up bonus. At the time it was the best credit card sign up bonus that had ever been heard of. I told a few people who I knew would be interested, but when it had already expired and I mentioned it to some people everyone got mad at me for not telling them too! SO, here I am, doing my duty to all my wonderful blog readers. America Airlines has a couple of amazing offers out right now. Click on this link to one of the travel blogs I follow to get all the details, but basically you can get up to 100,000 miles for signing up and using the card plus the annual fee is waived for the first year. American is a good airline, pretty great about their reward bookings, and 100,000 miles will get you to: Europe twice, South America almost three times, plus anywhere else in the world at least once. Go, be free, see the world!


*Oh, and for those of you that already have the Citi AA Visa card, you can still qualify for the bonus on the Citi AA AmEx card.

Miles & Travel

Many of you know that I/we love to travel. Along with that I (just me, I'm the only insane one) have made a hobby out of frequent flyer miles. It's what happens when your husband has a job that requires twice as many hours of work as yours does (at least this time of year). So I admit it, I have a slight obsession with frequent flyer miles. It's how we got to South America (those were $2000/each plane tickets!). It's how we're getting to Peru in May. Its fantastic!

I try to keep up with all the new offers that come out for a variety of airlines. As we plan more and more trips with our miles people start asking me how I do it so...I thought I would share some new things when they come out.

Now, if you really want to make a hobby out if it, you should keep up with FlyerTalk. It's pretty much the Mecca of miles enthusiasts. (And for those of you laughing at me right now they have 250k members, I am definitely on the least-crazy end of the spectrum).

But if you just think it's kinda cool to get some miles once in a while, read ahead:

There are tons of credit card offers out there that give you anywhere from 25k-35k miles for signing up. But signing up for tons of credit cards can significantly hurt your credit, so I try to stay away from those. Here's my current favorite non-credit card deal.

Chase will give you 25k miles if you sign up for their Continental Airlines checking account. The account is free as long as you have direct depoist going in (I send $5 of my paycheck there). The debit card has a $25 annual fee (don't let them convince you to get the more expensive one, you don't need it to get the miles). You get miles when you use the debit card, but mainly you just think about it as paying $25 to get 25k miles, which is an amazing deal.
Here's the coupon:   make sure you refresh the coupon before printing it, you need the unique offer code.

But it gets even better...

They will ALSO give you another 25k for opening up a business account with them. "But I don't have a business Mackenzie!". I just told them I sell stuff on Craigslist. Which is very true. Let me know if you want some help with this one....I promise it really is easy. Here's the coupon on that one.

If you still need some inspiration to get your butt out the door and head to Chase click here to see how few miles is takes to go some really cool places. Hawaii, the Caribbean, Central America, and Northern South America are all only 35k miles. Europe is only 55k.

DO IT!




More will follow in the coming days/weeks....