Introduction Ten Things I Did in Rio Getting There, Getting Around, and General Impressions Review: JW Marriott Rio de Janeiro As I landed in Istanbul last Valentine’s Day, I received an e-mail alerting me to an inordinately low fare to Rio de Janeiro on United for pretty much all year. I just happened to be…
Two weekends ago, I booked an impulsive, last-minute weekend trip to Anchorage, Alaska on a Wednesday night — my flight was scheduled for first thing on Friday morning. After a late Thursday night out in DC, I found myself at Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport for an early-ish 7:45am flight to Chicago. Before I booked…
In early 2012, I started to really understand how to seriously accrue a ton of airline miles, and I began to travel on a regular basis using many of the things I learned. That year, I flew over 96,000 miles on a variety of trips. This year, I’ve already eclipsed 2012, by traveling over 100,000…
What happens when I have a wide-open long weekend, $1,300 in United eCertificates, and the desire to not do the same-old, same-old in DC? Why, I book an impulsive trip to Alaska for the weekend, of course! So I’ve been thinking about this for a while, as the fare has been out there for a…
I hear it from people all the time: “I can’t earn enough miles to do anything!” Well, what these people generally don’t know is that there are a myriad of ways to earn miles. And odds are, they don’t know how to effectively redeem miles in a way that offers the maximum value for those…
Probably the most common question that people ask me is, “how do you find such good deals? Where do you look for these cheap fares?” There is not a quick, simple answer to that question. There are several different avenues that I monitor on a regular basis for good fares. I’ll detail those later in…
As the mid-way point of 2013 has come and gone, I’ve been meaning to assess how much I have actually traveled so far this year. It feels like the entire month of June I was out of the country, and I know I’ve spent plenty of weekends on the left coast, or in another country all…