I want to use Tuesday posts to give quick travel tips that I've found to be most useful. Enjoy!

Airline Twitter Teams - If you're not tweeting, you're doing it wrong.

If you don't have a twitter account and you do any sort of traveling, you need to get one. My favorite travel tip is how amazing airline twitter teams are at responding to tweets. It's always 100x easier to get help via twitter than it will be using any other method, I guarantee you. 

As someone who has experienced a fair amount of travel-related mishaps including, but not limited to: delays, broken DSLR cameras in gate checked bags (oops), a forgotten Kindle (same flight), cancelled flights, etc. - twitter is my best friend. Consider this: as bad as airline customer service generally is, their social media teams are usually the complete opposite. 

I always get questions asking for the best websites to find cheap flights. I know that everyone is hoping there's a magic site that they haven't heard about yet that will have all of the cheapest flights in one place (me too). Unfortunately, that's not the case. Finding flight deals is hard work and unfortunately, there's no magic site. I usually spend quite a bit of time searching multiple websites before I make any decisions. Below are some sites that I like to use when planning both US-based travel and international travel.

US-Based Travel 

Fare Matrix by ITA

The Fare Matrix by ITA software can be used for both US and international flights. It's a powerful flight search tool that is often used by professionals like travel agents to find the best flight deals for a given routing. With the Fare Matrix, you can also set a starting point and and end point, choose a length of stay and set the system to search +/- two days and it will spit out the cheapest dates to buy your flight on. When you're getting ready to drop $1000+ on an international flight, it's a great idea to check the Fare Matrix and see if you can get a cheaper flight by flying out on Thursday instead of Saturday.

If you would like any additional information on how to best take advantage of Fare Matrix's features, check out this guide from The Flight Deal and also this post from Hack My Trip.

Part I: Credit Cards
Part II: Points and Miles
Part III: Aspirations, Earn and Burn

So far, we've covered earning all of these awesome miles and points, but now we need to cover the fun part - spending them!

Aspirations

One of the most awesome parts of travel hacking is the aspirational travel you can achieve. Have you ever taken one of those long international flights in an economy class middle seat directly in front of a kicking, screaming three year old? Have you considered how much better that flight would be in a first class lie-flat bed with bottomless champagne? Have you ever considered paying tens of thousands of dollars to upgrade?

My guess is that you answered “yes” to the first two questions and a resounding “no” to the third question. First class does cost an incredible amount more (in some cases, up to $20,000 for one international ticket), but once you start travel hacking and earning miles and points, you could be traveling in style - totally free!

Here are a few of my aspirational travel goals:

Fly first class on Emirates Airlines

Did you know they have a shower? On the plane? While you’re flying? Enough said.

I priced out a sample fare on December 1, 2014:

Example flight: SFO > Dubai, First Class

Cost (in dollars): $23,327.90
Cost (in miles): 90,000

Part I: Credit Cards
Part II: Points and Miles
Part III: Aspirations, Earn and Burn

What absolutely kills me is when people don’t sign up for loyalty programs and leave valuable points and miles on the table every time they travel. I don’t care how short the trip is or how rarely you use that airline or hotel chain, every point can be valuable and there is nothing more important (or more simple) than adding your frequent flyer number to that flight reservation!

One of my favorite tools for keeping track of my rewards accounts is Award Wallet. It’s a surprisingly simple site that can be used to track miles and points and I use it every time I book a flight or hotel reservation and need to remember my loyalty program details. Super simple and easy to access your information at any time - now you have no excuses!

Part I: Credit Cards
Part II: Points and Miles
Part III: Aspirations, Earn and Burn

I discovered “travel hacking” in 2011 from an article on cnn.com. I had no idea it was an actual thing and I got so excited when I realized what it meant. For those of you who aren’t familiar, travel hacking is basically a way to travel while spending as little money as possible, usually by earning miles and points that can be redeemed for flights or hotels. Since I don’t have a trust fund and work doesn’t send me on travel, the idea of travel hacking was immediately appealing to me. I’ve since spent a lot of time learning and thinking about the best ways to hack my trips and I’ll cover the basics over the next few posts.

Credit Cards

The easiest way to start earning miles and points is to begin by collecting credit cards. Most people are skeptical of this because we have always been taught to somewhat fear credit cards and to protect our credit score. The funny thing is, most people don’t even know what their credit score is based on. For those of you who don’t, your credit score is based on the following factors (in order of importance):