The colorful accounts of friends and relatives, depicting perfect beaches in the Maldives or cool urban cities of London tend to trigger the same conflict of emotions as envy and confusion. To achieve the dream of international travel may seem like a far off, very costly experience and only the very wealthy few realize it. But what could happen should there be a systematic approach to lower the price of travel to a fraction of the sticker price? Yes, but what if the trick to opening these doors was not only a matter of economizing, but a matter of playing a game of strategy in which the money you spend day to day, could get you plane tickets first-class and room in a five-star hotel? This is the world of travel Hacking. It is not about stealing into the computer systems; it is the art of comprehending the possibility of using airline, hotel, and credit card loyalty programs so that one amasses points and can travel just at a minimal charge. This is a guide customized to you as the traveler who is aspired to travel in Pakistan to demystify this hobby as well as provide the basic steps on how you can transform the dreams that you may have to travel into a well planned one. And before we start walking anywhere, there is one golden (and uninterrupted) rule of this game which must be established that we should all pay off our credit card in the full and in due time everywhere MONTHLY. Travel hacking is not about incurring debt, but instead using rewards. The interest rates will eliminate any benefits you can get out of points and miles immediately, and this is financial discipline is the very step to success.
The process of journey into travel hacking does not start with an application form to get a credit card; rather, it starts with a clear objective. The Thing is that “I want to travel free” is too ambiguous. A strong aspiration can be expressed as, I want to fly business the Lahore-Dubai Emirates flight to celebrate the anniversary next year or I want to use a four-night hotel accommodation at a Marriott hotel in Kuala Lumpur on our family trip. This specificity plays a major role since it determines your strategy, and which loyalty programs you need to target. Big three Gulf carriers Emirates Skywards, Qatar Airways Privilege Club, and Etihad Guest are obvious and the most potent airline loyalty programs to most international travelers leaving Pakistan. The global networks provided by these airlines through their close proximity hubs are enormous; hence it is the most convenient option when it comes to miles earning and redemption. You will first have to visit their websites and apply to each of these programs which is absolutely free of charge. On the same note, subscribe to the big hotel loyalty programs such as Marriott BonVoy, Hilton Honors, and IHG Rewards. This step is just to get the containers that you will then fill with points. It is not necessary to be loyal to all of them, but having the accounts ready is required in case the opportunities present themselves.
Enrolling on such programs is merely potting up an empty bucket. What is difficult and what the heart of travel hacking is to discover how to put points and miles in that bucket, without necessarily boarding an aircraft. Here you can use your wallet as your greatest asset. The most important point on travel hacking as a beginner is credit card sign-up bonus. It is a big amount of point or miles in a single transaction that is given by a bank once you apply and get approved on a new credit card and spend some minimum amount of money in the initial months. There are various credit cards created by the banks in Pakistan such as HBL, UBL, MCB Bank and Standard Chartered which are directed towards specific consumers. With a beginner status, the simplest one is a co-branded credit card. This is a card which is collaborative between a bank and a carrier and in the hypothetical example, a “Standard Chartered Qatar Airways Privilege Club Card.” What is beautiful about this cards is that, they are simple, each rupee that you spend will pick you miles automatically credited to your account of airline loyalty program. The sign-up bonus is the only factor which matters when selecting a card. You can look for deals such as “Get 50 000 bonus miles within the first three months, upon spending PKR 250 000.” A single bonus is usually sufficient to compensate a round-trip economy ticket to a nearby international destination or an upgrade, one-way to business class. In addition, look at the amount of annual fee together with the benefits that will come with it which in most cases may contain lots of goodies such as airport lounge access to Allama Iqbal International Airport or other local and international airline terminals and this makes your travel to be a luxurious one.
After selecting and selecting your initial travel credit car, the game is now on earnestly. That quick target is to satisfy the minimum spending requirement in order to earn that profitable sign-up bonus. This is a crucial stage that one may not spend on it blindly. It is wrong to purchase things which you do not need to achieve the target. Rather, the game plan will be to run all your usual, budgeted, daily expenses on this new card. Write down your recurrent costs: the monthly shopping of your family, in a store such as Al-Fatah or Metro, the payment of your bills, electricity and gas (most can currently be paid online through credit card), the costs of fuel, the fees of your children in schools, the recharges of your mobile phones, the shopping online, in a platform such as Daraz. All this organic spending on a single card is more likely to push you to achieve the minimum spend than you might first think. In fact, to make it smoother still, time your credit card application to a big, intended purchase. When you understand that you have to buy a new air conditioner, spend on wedding bills, or buy new furniture, by taking your new travel card to pay on that one and only big purchase, you will be able to fulfill at least a big part of the spending requirement in one stretch and that too in a responsible way.
Your spending strategy drawn, now you can begin to think about how to multiply your earnings, or as they say, ride the two horses at the same time or, in other words, how to multiply your income and how to earn more that is called double-dipping. It is the process of making two point sources on one particular transaction. One of them is with the help of the online booking portals. The hotel booking portal gave most airline loyalty programs such as Emirates Skywards their own portals. You may book the same hotel at the Emirates Skywards Hotels portal (when you log in) instead of making booking through the hotel own site. In doing so, you will get a number of Skywards miles during your stay. When you then use your co-branded Emirates credit card to settle that hotel stay which you have booked through the portal, you will get the mileage of that portal booking and the mileage of the purchase through the credit card. It is a straight but effective method in order to speed up your take-home pay. In the same way, most reward programs have online-shops which collaborate with different stores. You can visit your loyalty account before shopping on the Web, you can go through their shopping portal to your preferred store and so long as you spend you get to earn additional miles with each rupee charging to your earnings, besides what you are earning your credit card. Taking such minor detours before you buy or book hotels via loyalty program portals is one of the key habits of any travel hacker.
It is a thrilling experience to scoop up a whole lot of points but it only represents an uphill process. Actually, it is your redemption of points that will carry the day in case of your travel hacking. This is simple to use points to obtain gift cards or products, with practically always dreadful value. Redemption of the flight tickets in highest value and the final aim of everyone is the flight in business or first-class. As an illustration, an economy flight between Lahore and London may be priced at 250,000 Pkr or 80,000 miles. The price of business class ticket on the same route could be 900,000 PKR or 160,000 miles. Your miles go to around 3.1 PKR per unit in the economy redemption. When you are in the business category where you are redeeming the miles, then every single mile will be worth 5.6 PKR which is almost twice as much. You also have a chance to experience a little bit of luxury that you would probably not buy with money out of pocket by saving your points to redeem them in these forms. Nevertheless, it is imperative to be realistic in regard to free traveling. Even when you use points to book an award ticket, you have to pay the taxes and fees which can come to few dollars to about hundreds of dollars depending upon which city you are departing even in Europe where flight taxes and fees are very high.
The last puzzle that fits in is knowing the availability of awards. The number of seats available on any given flight to be purchased using miles is restricted and only the lowest fare structure, saver normally can be booked using miles. Such seats may be limited and they might be unavailable at peak travel periods such as summer holidays or near Eid. It translates to the fact that you should be as flexible as is possible. A family of four is not going to find a saver award flight on the specific days you want to travel by merely beginning to search a month ahead. The most effective is starting the search on the site of the airline on the possibility of awarding the flight with as much time in advance as possible the best time is 11 to 12 months ahead. Access the award calendar functionality of the airline, the option that will enable you view an availability of the entire week or the entire month so that you can determine the cheapest days in the low-end saver award. Willingness to leave a day or two in advance or in the back of the originally planned appointment can make the difference between finding a fantastic redemption and not finding anything. This is the easy search that you as a novice need to concentrate on. As you become a bit more advanced you will come across transfer bonuses in flexible bank point programs and these can enable you to further extend the value you get out of your earnings.
Travel hacking may be a larger and more complicated world than it initially appears, yet when simplified, there are just these simple principles which form the backbone of the whole scheme. Start small. Just choose 1 travel goal. Select an airline program to deal with. Get a single good credit card which fits that objective. Be serious and meet the minimum spend using your regular expenses without paying a part of the bill. Get the fundamentals of high value travel redemptions. This is not the get-rich-quick type of business but a rewarding hobby that earns its returns to us in terms of incredible life experiences. Nothing compares to the sensation of sitting in the business class seat, drinking a coffee and flying above the clouds, knowing that you are doing so with the help almost exclusively of your smart planning, financial control. Your left-to-see-the-world expedition may not begin by having a huge savings account; but can begin by the choice to play the game smarter right now.
Then you have got the theory. You are religiously enrolled in the important loyalty programs, you have selected your initial travelling credit card and by managing your daily expenses, you have already managed to accumulate your first decent bucket of miles. It is the anticipation of that point balance jump the first few times at the beginning of the use of this system which is so motivational a visible confirmation that not only is this system working, it is amazing how well it works. Now on the actual work must commence. You are all set to go deeper into the second chapter and read about the tactics that can take you past the stage of a curious amateur and turn you into a seasoned moderate travel hacker. The next level has to do with piling into your plan, diversifying your points portfolio, and picking up the more subtle skills that unlock incredible value and turn this hobby into an engine that powers your travel dreams in an approach that is sustainable.
The first step to take into levelling up is the power of flexible points currencies. Though a co-branded airline card is an excellent and easy place to start, they are only good as far as a single loyalty program, and their points are hostage. Even a more sophisticated plan is to get a credit card with the bank that has a flexible reward program of its own. In Pakistan in some of the higher value cards offered by banks such as Standard Chartered or HBL the points may be transferred to various different airline and hotel partners. That is the cauldron of flexibility in travel hacking. Put yourself in the place where you have bank points as a universal travel currency. You are not constrained to flying Emirates anymore and can transfer your points to any other airline, maybe like Qatar Airways, or even to such a hotel program as Hilton Honors, the choice is yours, which will give you the maximum value towards achieving your particular travel objective. It is also a much important defense against devaluation. Just because one airline makes a sudden change to the amount of miles required to fly your dream, you cannot be held captive since you basically can switch gears and move your points to a different partner with better value.
You can start to play in two-player mode, a strategy that can be one of the most powerful ones in the couples and family arena, as you feel more comfortable. The moment you manage to get a sign-up bonus on a card, your significant other or well-known family member (or any person that you trust) can also take the same card. This enables your family to receive two independent signing bonuses, which basically doubles your point earnings towards a common travel objective. It is also possible to have the family pooling in many loyalty programs, where the household members can connect their accounts in order to pool their points and it is significantly easier to earn a needed number of points to get several tickets or a more ambitious destination. This team effort will cut the saving period by half, making what should have been a two-year objective to save up a vacation a one-year affair. Moreover, the more you go, the more you will be thankful about the other benefits your cards may provide you with the points are not the only idea. Look carefully at the access to airport lounge. A high-value card could give you membership to CIP lounge in Allama Iqbal International Airport or a Priority Pass membership which opens doors to more than a thousand lounges in the world. This advantage in itself can turn the process of waiting on flight into the comfortable and relaxing break, with free food, drink, and Wi-Fi, which saves you your money if you would have spent it on exorbitant airport foods.
Having a strong foundation of points-earning, you may begin using more proactive measures to speed up the process. It will start by actively searching friend referral bonuses. After you choose a card you want, a bank can give you an individual reference link. In case a friend or family member should apply, get accepted and use it with your referral link, the bank with reward you a nice bonus of thousands of points. It is one of the simplest means of reloading your account. At the same time, you have to turn yourself into an active participant in the reliable programs you enroll in. Don not leave the points there but communicate with the ecosystem. Subscribe to marketing emails of your favorite airline and hotel schemes. These mail are not junk mails, they are treasure maps. They will be announcing time-limited deals, like a 30 percent bonus when you move your points between your bank and airline, offers of earning double miles when you flew to a particular area, or sale of award redemptions. It is the role of the intermediate travel hacker who possesses the knowledge on how to gain everything out of each point and to be aware of these promotions and to organize the dates of transfers and bookings in accordance with these offers.
The awareness of the architecture of airline alliances is perhaps the most excellent jump in your travel hacking learning stage. This idea opens the real international potential of your points. The three largest groups of airlines in the world are organized in form of alliances namely, Star Alliance (e.g. Turkish Airlines, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines), oneworld (e.g. Qatar Airways, British Airways, Cathay Pacific) and SkyTeam (e.g. Saudia, KLM, Air France). The magic here is that the miles on one airline in an alliance may be used to book flights on virtually any other airline in the alliance via partnership flight searching. This is an earth shaking discovery. To give an example, your well-earned Qatar Airways Privilege Club miles (which are based upon Avios) are not just to fly with Qatar Airways. You can use them to make reservation of a British Airways flight between London and New York, a Cathay Pacific flight between Hong Kong and Tokyo, and a Royal Jordanian flight between Amman and Cairo. This tremendously increases the range of your choices, so you can fly to places where the first airline might never go, and even search award space in a dozen different carrier databases to find a free seat.
With this airline alliance knowledge, you can go hunting of the sweet spot redemptions. Each loyalty program maintains its own award table (the sheet that determines how many miles it takes to fly between one region and another) and these tables are full of oddities and flaws that leave lots of little valleys of insane value. To be concrete, Avios, the currency of both British Airways and Qatar Airways, is based on distance, that is, with short-haul flying it is possible that flights are very inexpensive in points-per-mile. A Doha to one of the other Gulf cities, such as Muscat or Kuwait, would however be an excellent use of points relative to the cash price. The other sweet spot is to connect with a partner airline in an alliance whose taxes and carrier-imposed fare is lower. As an example, a transatlantic trip on American Airlines that uses your Avios will generally cost a lot less in fees than a transatlantic flight on British Airways involving the same stretch, and you will again save hundreds of dollars not only in terms of out-of-pocket expenses. The sweet spots can be found after spending some time reading about it on travel hacking blogs and forums and the amount of savings collected is incredible. You can also introduce amazing flexibility to your travel making stopovers and learning to book stopovers- where you can spend a few days as layover in a destination city at no additional mileage expense and some programs like Emirates Skywards are famous in this aspect.
The more advanced your travel hacking has become (you have several loyalty accounts and one or two credit cards) the more imperative organization becomes. Make an excel sheet to track your credit cards, the amounts of fee that you have to pay yearly and the number of days within which you have to achieve the minimum amount spent on this card. Another concern is keeping track of your constantly expanding portfolio of points and miles. Login one of the tracking services, such as AwardWallet. This app will safely save the logins to all your various accounts and will automatically monitor your balances and expiration dates in a single easy to read screen so that you get to avoid logging into a dozen websites. This is an organization that matters since points and miles are an aging thing. Without much or any warning, airlines are able and often inclined to devalue their programs by adding miles necessary to earn a qualifying flight. The golden rule consequently, is to earn and then burn. Never save your points ten years in order to have the ideal trip. Set the goal of cashing in on an excellent trip after about one to two years so that you never lose the value of the points. This attitude can save you against the impending inflation of the points world and make sure that you are constantly reaping the benefits of your hard-earned labour. The object of this hobby is not to accrue a personal fortune in points; instead this is all about developing a regular stream of epic adventures in the travel industry. When you adopt these pro-level tactics, you can change yourself: no longer are you a person that has scored a great deal once, but someone that has developed a long-term, low-cost system to travel your whole life.
