The Travel Hack Airlines DON'T Want You to Know

Most people are stuck in a system designed to work harder and not smarter. We're here to expose the strategies, the loopholes and the life hacks for 1% use.

This is universal basic knowledge.

Flying first for business class feels like a luxury only the ultra wealthy can afford. I mean, who can afford a $20,000 ticket? But what if I told you that you didn't have to pay these insane ticket prices to still enjoy that $20,000 seat? Did you know that airlines don't expect most people to pay full price for first in business class? The entire pricing model is built on two things, points and demand fluctuations. Yet 90% of people still overpay. Most people that are flying business are usually flying business through their company. Companies are way more price insensitive when it comes to business class tickets. If they're sending an executive overseas for a business meeting. Some wealthy people still pay for business class tickets, but. But you don't have to. So here's the game. Airlines release premium seats at high prices, but as the flight date gets closer, they need to fill those empty seats. You can use a mix of travel points, mistake fares, last minute upgrade tickets to get those same eight, ten $20,000 tickets for $1,000 or even free. When it comes to traveling first class, the keys to success are credit card points, airline status and the right timing. Half of the people sitting first class didn't pay full price. So. So your most reliable way of hacking first class is going to be through points. Amex, Chase, Sapphire, a variety of these credit cards have the best mechanisms to be able to get points that you can transfer into airline miles. Right? So the Amex system.

You want to make sure to use the reward hubs. So if you have say 150,000 points, you transfer it to the airline of your choosing after you use a service to find your reward fare. So in the past which we'll link here in the show notes, you want to use a service like seats Aero. This is an excellent website to see what reward fares are out there on what airline. So you may see that you can get an economy ticket for 20,000 miles from here to Europe or to Japan. You may see you'd be able to get a business class ticket for 50,000 miles. I just saw one from Dubai, you yesterday from Chicago to Dubai for 50,000 miles. That's less than $500 worth of points. It's honestly an amazing deal for a $5,000 ticket. So that is the best way to do it. Make sure you do not use these 150,000 points. To book it through the Amex Travel portal. So if you see something that says do you want to pay this with your credit card or with your points, you are in the wrong place. Do not use that portal unless you absolutely have to pay something with cash. That is when you want to use that portal so you can get some bonus points. But for Rewards Hub, that is not where you want to focus and use these points because you will get a very small multiple on your points and you can 10x them when you transfer them to partner airlines such as American airlines, Emirates, etc. Right. And so first you want to go to seats that arrow, find your transfer fares, take your points and then transfer it here. Chase has the same mechanism. Basically any credit card company is going to have that. And then you can go into these platforms and book those reserve fares and again, really highly recommend Seaside Arrow. This is the most reliable way. Typically, if you have a travel that's coming down the pipeline, say one month, two months, three months from now, you could still do it in if it's within a couple of days or a week, I've done both. But this is the most reliable way and one of the best ways to get 10x value with points. Now, if you go this method, and this is usually my first, my first choice, we're going to go down the path here of like, you know, first attempt, second attempt, third attempt, and surely hopefully you win before you have to pay full price. The next point is status. Now, status on an airline is excellent when you have it, but it's very difficult to achieve generally if you're not a big traveler. Now, there's two ways for you to get status. And even if you have a low status, there's a way to get a higher status. Now here are the two ways to do it. Okay, so we're going to go over two examples. One is status challenge.

Status challenge. And then two, I'm going to turn my right down here, so I have a little room here is to buy temporary status, which is a bit similar to this but a little unique. Okay, so a status challenge is you can go to certain websites. A website like this is called Basis Travel. We'll link it in the show notes. Again, not getting paid for that, but I've used it and seen it. And essentially what they're able to do is for about 200 to $400, you can do something called a status challenge with your airline account. They believe they do it for United and I believe they do it for Delta. So an example is I can have a normal account, and then I could qualify for a status challenge for two to $400 for four months. And what this is is that you will get 1k, which is 1 of the highest tiers that you can get on United for free. And essentially you will have that. And then the goal is that you're supposed to fly a certain amount to keep that 1k status. Now, if you don't hit it, there's no penalty, right? You're basically paying the 2 to $400 to get this 1k status. Now, the best time to use this is when you have a big trip that you're planning, right? So if you're going to Hawaii or if you're going to Japan and you want to potentially get upgraded with your 1k status, then essentially this is the time to do it, right? Is buy this $200. You buy the economy ticket, right? And typically an economy ticket may be 500 to $800, right? You buy the status challenge and then essentially you get upgraded with your 1k, and your total cost for that business class ticket is $1300, right, as an example. So one way and then another, you know, 500 on the way back. So maybe it's $1,800, right? But now all of your flights for the next four months, you have a high likelihood of getting Upgraded as a 1K member as part of United. So this is a very good way to try it out. It's relatively cheap. And we will link the website that you can try this on. Now, another way to even one up this, that's quite interesting if it's available, is you can go on sites like ebay.

And you want to look up something called plus points, right? So plus points, they work for United.

And basically these are the points that you use to upgrade your travel. So basically, if you're on economy, I could use a certain amount of plus points to get business class tickets. It's usually, I believe, 40 points on international flights and 20 points on domestic flights to upgrade to the next status. And so on United, you can actually buy plus points for around, you know, 400 bucks, I believe, for 40 points, you know, and the prices fluctuate depending on the time of year if they're about to expire. Now, what's interesting here is that if you bought the economy ticket that I mentioned here for five to eight hundred dollars and you blot these pus points, right, and you paid another 400 bucks, you're all in at $1200. And then essentially you are traveling business class, right? And the ticket will likely be around $5,000. And what's happening here is that these are people that have the status, they have the plus points. Maybe they're business travelers, maybe they're consultants. And what they're doing is that they are buying the fare for you and transferring it to your account and then basically selling the points because they're not going to use them for whatever reason. This is a gray area when it comes to United and some of these airlines. But again, they are essentially doing that for you and then you are able to get the upgrade. Now, the type of plus points that you want to look for are people that have something called Global Services on United. If you do do this, Global Services is basically the black card of United. You have to spend a certain amount. It's not something that you can earn generally, you have to be invited to this program. But they are the highest level tier on the United platform. And essentially sometimes you will see global services + points because when you buy someone's plus points, you also get their status temporarily for that flight. So if I buy Global Services plus Points, I am a Global Services member in terms of the airline status on my queue of priority as compared to everyone else for that one flight. Right. And so this is a excellent way to travel first in business class for a significant discount, you know, from the $5,000. This will usually be a second tool that I will use if I'm traveling internationally. Now, the third one, and this one's tricky, but works quite often, but it usually only works in that last 24 to 48 hours before a flight. Right. And you know, what you can sometimes do, again I've mentioned this in the past in other circumstances is if you want to try this out, is first you book a refundable fare. If you want to plan your trip out weeks in advance, you buy a refundable fare so that you can essentially cancel that fare last minute in case one of these pops up. Right in this strategy, that way that if it doesn't pop up, you're still good to go. You, you know you're going to go on your trip. But if this is an opportunity, you can check it out. So what you might do is you can book an economy ticket.

And here's some sample pricing that I saw. You know, I actually did something like this in for Japan recently and the economy ticket was $800 one way. The business class ticket.

Was something like 4201 way. This is last minute, so it wasn't like that cheap. That's a pretty Big difference, right? That's $3,400. Now what I noticed is that there were a lot of business class seats available. There was like nine seats available on the flight and we're 24 or 48 hours out. So the likelihood of them selling out is relatively low. And typically what happens is as you get closer to that time, the airline will start selling those seats to people that are sitting in premium economy and an economy for a certain amount of dollars. You can only know this after you buy a ticket. So what I did is I bought an economy ticket. And one thing that people don't know is that when you buy a ticket, it doesn't matter if it's refundable or not. You have 24 hours to cancel a ticket from a US airline. So this is a very, very important thing because I actually bought two or three different flights because there were multiple on that day. And I basically saw if the upgrade was available in any of those flights and one of them did not have it. The first one I bought, it only had like four seats available and it did not have any options to upgrade. It was, it was very expensive if it did. So I canceled that one and then I booked a different one. And that flight which had the nine seats, I then saw that the upgrade from economy to business just to buy the seat or to first was only $400, right. Per seat. It was something of that nature to $800 or something like that. So my all in cost, then I bought this plus my economy, my all in cost was something like 1200-1600 dollars. And if you keep in mind what the original cost was was the 4200. And so we saved 60%. Right. And this was a very last minute situation that I had. Right. So I always advise, focus on points first, then this is your best bet. You can do this months out, weeks out, you know, very, very good. If you have something coming up, you know you're going to be traveling a lot during the summer, for example, is a great time to do this. Or in the holidays, if you know you're going to travel and you want to get status, then do a status match, right? You'll get that for four months. If you need to, you can always create a new account and get another status match on that account, for example. And you could basically have that or you can buy this last minute. Sometimes this works really well if you're a couple of weeks out and, and if you're in a crunch time last minute, you want to figure something out. This is always a great opportunity here. Buy a ticket, try a bunch of different airlines, see what they offer you in that last 24 hours. You can just buy and cancel, buy and cancel, buy and cancel until you find one that actually does it. And then essentially worst comes the worst. You're just going to fly in the economy, and it is what it is, you know. But you have essentially three opportunities to basically save anywhere from 60 to 90% legally, with no issues on any airline in the world. If this sounds interesting to you, join our free community. You don't need to be rich to live like the 1%. You just need to learn what they do. With the right strategies, you can 10x your lifestyle without spending any more than you do today. The difference is not income, it's information. This is universal basic knowledge.