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Just bought EQP to requalify for IHG Diamond through end of 2025! Since I usually buy miles for 0.5 cents, the $768 to buy 110,000 EQP was only a $218 premium, and I get Diamond again
Ran into the Mexican car insurance scam with Budget in Merida, Mexico 🇲🇽
Base rate was $18 USD a day, but if you didn't get the CDW costing minimum $85 USD a day, I had to put down a deposit of 330,000 MXN / $16,000 USD which obviously got rejected by all my credit cards.
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Hi everyone!
As follow-up to our photoshoot from our recent trip to Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji, a reader suggested that it would be great to offer a way for everyone to share their travel-hacking successes with others. So whether it’s a photo of a credit card that helped you out, a landscape you particularly enjoyed, or a selfie that you had to contort your arm to frame, send it on over to us at demflyers [at] gmail [dot] com, or tweet at us (@demflyers) with the hashtag #wearetitans.
Hello! This is a belated post from the DEM Flyers crew from our recent trip to New Zealand (and Australia, Fiji, and Hawaii!)
We knew we wanted to visit some of the more scenic parts of New Zealand like Milford Sound as well as Hobbiton, and without an extensive public transit system, what else was there to do but to rent a car? As the most confident driver, I volunteered to do the rental and all the driving. But I had never driven on the left side of the road before, and was worried about how easy it would be to adjust. So how did it go? I’ll talk about what was easy to get used to and what wasn’t so easy.
The DEM Flyers “Swimsuit” Calendar!
…not that kind of swimsuit calendar. Get your head out of the gutter!
Warning: This post is explicit. The photos are not. Enjoy!
It’s no secret that credit cards play a large part in the travel hacking game, and part of every handshake upon meeting a fellow travel hacker involves the obligatory dick credit card comparisons. These involve questions of the form:
The Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Tokyo is an anime lover’s dream. Unfortunately, it is very popular, and significant advanced planning is required to get tickets at a reasonable cost. Side note, the museum will be closed from Monday, May 9 through Friday, July 15, 2016 this year.
I’m finally going to visit the museum on my upcoming Japan trip with E, and wanted to share tips on how to actually secure a ticket.
Greetings from the Intercontinental Fiji! We can’t believe that we’ll be headed home in just a few short hours after our adventures (and misadventures!) in Sydney, Queenstown, Auckland, and now here. It’s been a blast traveling together, though, and we’ve gotten to work on a little surprise project going on that we’ll share with you in the coming weeks.
Before I go on, let me share with you exactly what I’m looking at right now:
Hey folks!
I was doing my own app-o-rama today, and I had intended to apply for the 50,000 point offer on the CitiBusiness AA Platinum Select card. Unfortunately, I found that most existing links are dead (as mentioned by most of the blogosphere a few weeks ago).
After some searching, however, I found a working link to the offer, which should be valid through April 30, 2016. Enjoy!
Due to various sales ex-EU in the past, I have some experience dealing the American Airlines reservation systems for flights from the European Union. American Airlines uses Amadeus for certain countries in the EU (in this case Ireland) instead of their usual SABRE.
I would often book directly through American because either I could only find the best fare on American vs. OTAs, or I wanted to use the hold feature. Google Flights would direct me to the americanairlines.eu.amadeus.com link. And when I tried to search for the same flight on aa.com, I was quoted a slightly higher price due to currency conversion to USD. But when I put a reservation on hold through the americanairlines.eu.amadeus.com website, and later tried to find it on the AA.com site to pay for it, I would get this message “Please call to book your trip”
Hello from Queenstown, where you get to wake up to this every morning:
Unfortunately, it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies getting here due to a snafu we had at the airport with our checked bags. To put it simply, we ended up shelling out $120/bag per person as the result of a series of mistakes we made.
Let’s start at the beginning. We purchased our tickets through Amex Travel, and we bought them for a Virgin Australia codeshare operated by Air New Zealand. At the time of ticketing, there was a notation saying that checked baggage fees were not charged at the time of booking, but as far as I’ve seen it says that for all tickets, and since it was an international flight, we assumed that a baggage allowance was included in a ticket. Furthermore, Michael has Star Alliance Gold status through a status match to Copa Airlines, which theoretically entitles him to an extra checked bag. So we were doubly good, right?
Hello from Sydney!
I just got this email from American Express offering a 30% discount on Membership Rewards redemptions for paid international flights through amextravel.com. This yields a redemption rate of 1.43 (1.0/0.7) cents per point, which is better than the rate for both the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Citi Thank You Prestige (unless you redeem for AA flights, for which you’d get 1.6 cents per point).
Greetings from Sydney!
At long last, the whole DEM Flyers crew is together in one place traveling for two weeks, and we could not be more excited. Unfortunately, Michael and I are still sitting on the tarmac at Sydney as we wait for a truck to tow our 747 the last 500 feet to the gate. So close, yet so far….
I don’t typically write trip reports, but I figured this occasion was significant enough to warrant it. And besides, I don’t have anything better to do ????
