Aloha. I'm starting this blog because I found a way to travel for free and I want to be able to share my experiences with others.
I was born and raised on the North Shore of Oahu and as any Hawaii residents can attest to, it's hard getting off the rock. What I mean by that is that it's expensive to travel when you live in Hawaii.
Many of my family members now live on the mainland which makes it expensive to visit them.
My wife and I have been married for twelve years and we have three young children. My mother and three of my siblings live in Utah and with a roundtrip ticket from Hawaii to Utah costing around $500 I quickly realized that I don't make enough money to be able to visit them very often. Because of this I started to look for other options.
I had always heard about frequent flyer but I didn't really know how they worked. Keeping track of the various frequent flyer miles just seemed like too much work to remember each of the usernames and passwords for each airline. It didn't seem like it was worth it, especially since I wasn't expecting to travel very often. It seems like a lot of people in Hawaii have the Hawaiian Airlines credit card, but at the rate that I make purchases I realized that I would only earn one free round trip to the mainland every 3 or 4 years.
A few years ago someone sat me down and explained how frequent flyer miles work and I've been hooked ever since. I started this process in July of 2015 and since then I've been able to travel with my wife and kids to Maui, Kauai, as well as to the mainland twice. That's 8 round trip tickets to Utah, 4 round trip tickets to Maui, and 4 round trip tickets to Kauai. Normally I would have paid around $5,000 in airline tickets for all that travelling but by taking advantage of several credit card promotions I ended up getting all of those airline tickets for free (it ended up costing about $11 per ticket, just under $200 for all 16 tickets, to cover the various taxes).
I have a lot more travelling to do in 2017 including another round trip to Utah with my family this summer which I'm hoping will include a stop in California to visit Disneyland.
As I learned more and more about how this all works I would tell my friends and family about it. Unfortunately, most of the information out there doesn't apply to people flying out of Hawaii so when my friends and family would try to find information from the websites that I'd refer them to they would get overloaded by all of the information and they would quickly lose interest before even getting started.
I've literally spent hundreds of hours reading up on how the various credit card and airline/hotel programs work. Every time I learned something new I would everyone I know about it, but recently I've had more requests from people asking me to walk them through this process than I have time in the day to do so. Because of this, I am to creating this blog to provide information for my friends and family who live in Hawaii (but much of this info applies to anyone living anywhere in the US) to let them know about the things I've learned that have allowed me to travel from Hawaii for free.
FYI, I'm not selling anything, just passing the info along.
