Unless you are living under a proverbial rock (in which case, I’d love to know how you found this blog), you heard by now of the insane Cathay Pacific business and first class mistake fares that were available departing from Hanoi. Heck, my dad heard about it. The deal was insane — cheaper-than-economy price tickets on one of the best business or first class products in the world.

If you got in on the deal, congrats. To the confusion of my friends and family, I didn’t. It wasn’t that I missed the deal. I was online for it as it was discovered. Instead, I chose not to. Crazy, right?

Why We Travel (Hack)

If you’re like me, you probably got into travel hacking when a friend shared some mistake or cheap fare to a country you were interested in going to. For me, that was a $400 round-trip fare to India, which I took with my friend Jacob and kicked off a multi-year stint of jetsetting that made me the envy of many of my friends and family. (In the context of the Cathay Pacific deal, this one seems amateurish in retrospect).

Over the last few years, I’ve accumulated a wealth of incredible experiences and encounters. I saw a play at the Sydney Opera House, took a flamenco class from a world-famous dancer, visited the site of genocide in Cambodia, and hiked the W-trail in Patagonia, to name a tiny few. Those are the flashy ones, the ones that earn social “cred.”

DEM Flyers Shenanigans at the Park Hyatt Sydney

Perhaps more importantly, I got to celebrate the holidays with my family, see my sister graduate from college, and kindle a burgeoning relationship with my partner. 

We travel for many reasons — to see beautiful things, to experience new cultures, to connect with friends and family — and we travel hack to travel better, cheaper, or more often. However, in the thrill of the deal and the likes and the shares it’s easy to forget that our travel is not free.

Climate Change

The cost of world travel is its contribution climate change. Every 1,000 (economy) passenger miles flown dumps about a third of a ton of carbon dioxide into the air, which has the effect of trapping progressively more heat in the earth via the greenhouse effect. This in turn affects global climate and weather patterns, destabilizing many of the natural environments that are often the destination of our travels in the first place.

Preparing for smoke in San Francisco. At least you could still see the sky at this point.

We often think of climate change as affecting far off places like the arctic and beings other than humans. Unfortunately, in the last few years that’s ceased to be the case. Whether it be hurricanes, droughts, or forrest fires, we’ve seen the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters. I was among those who thought I was immune to the effects, given my position of relative wealth and status, until the recent forest fires that cloaked the Bay Area in smoke as damaging as smoking eleven cigarettes in a day

Aviation is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, and as travel hackers chasing mistake fares, we are culpable in contributing to the problem.

That’s not to say flying is evil. It’s transformative and has been essential to our steady progress in global health and well-being over the last century. It allows us to move vaccines from laboratories in France to warzones in Africa. It allows us to move food grown in California to a grocery store in New York. 

However, just as flying is incredible because humans are not equipped to soar in the air, flying is unsustainable because it leads us to do things we didn’t evolve to do. Unintuitively, flying is more energy efficient than driving, but flying makes it easier to travel unimaginable distances in tolerable times. Three years ago, Jacob and I hopped down to Los Angeles for a day to see my then-favorite band perform at a concert. Would I have driven the five hours to do that? Absolutely not. Going one step further, would I really spend three days to drive across the country to visit my parents? (For the sake of my familial relations, I will not answer that here, but you can read between the lines 😛)

Three Years, In Pictures

Thinking about this fact has led me to re-evaluate my travel patterns in the last few years, which is one of the reasons you’ve heard less of me on the blog. Here’s how things have changed:

2017: 122,000 miles

2018: 56,000 miles

2019: 35,000 miles (30,000 planned, 5,000 buffer)

(Maps generated using the Great Circle Mapper)

What I’m Doing

The simplest change for me has been to stop chasing mistake fares, and to let where I truly want to go dictate where I end up going. As painful as it was to see such an amazing deal as the Cathay mistake fares go by, buying a ticket would have meant two trips to Asia that I hadn’t planned for (four, if you count my partner or a friend) and would rather “save” for when I want to visit my grandparents in Japan whom I’ve only seen a few times in my life or a special event like attending my maternal grandmother’s 90th birthday.

The second change I have made has been equally easy and moreover, fulfilling — to find places closer to home that are just as exotic or wondrous as the other, farther places I could go. My partner and I visited Kauai last year instead of New Zealand, alternating hikes with snorkeling, kayaking, and seeing double rainbows. We took a trip to Vancouver instead of Europe, replete with a swanky hotel stay and delicious pastries. These sorts of substitutions have huge impact. They’re not just switching off a lightbulb. They’re switching off thousands of lightbulbs, thousands of times.

What does it mean?

I believe that anyone can do this, and that everyone must do this if the places that we are visiting now are going to survive for our kids to see them.

Three Years, In Pictures

It’s true, my “world” has become much smaller. My travel maps have shrunk from needing the full globe, to a single hemisphere, to just a quarter of the earth’s area. Why am I doing it? I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves:

2017: Baseline. The global average was 4.3 tons, per https://www.iea.org/geco/emissions/

2018: I more than halved my flying and became vegetarian

2019: Another ~40% reduction in flying, plus switching to solar-generated electricity

(Calculations generated using the Cool Climate Calculator from UC Berkeley)

What You Can Do

I understand those who don’t feel the same way as I do about climate and the environment, or where climate change sits relative to their wants and needs. I’d love to talk to you more if you fall in either of those camps, but at the very least, I’d like to offer you an indulgence: if you truly cannot reduce your travel and you truly want to do something about it, consider contributing to Rainforest Action Network commensurate with the “social cost” of carbon emissions, which has been estimated to be anywhere between $85 and $300 per ton. (Sorry, the $5-$10 offered by airlines through the Nature Conservancy doesn’t begin to make up for the damage we’re doing to human health and the health of the planet). If you have no upcoming travel, or jumped in on the mistake fare, contribute to offsetting 25 HAN-YVR round-trips here: https://www.gofundme.com/dem-flyers-cx-mistake-fare

I feel a bit weird about ending with a request for donations, so I’ll leave you with this. We are incredibly privileged to engage in a hobby that involves hopping in a metal can, drinking expensive champagne, and hopping out a few hours later in places that our grandparents would have seen only in books. There will always be more mistake fares, but we only have one earth. Let’s not screw it up.