People are always asking me how I get to travel so much. It’s easy, and I’m going to let you in on a few tips and tricks of getting your money’s worth—plus more—when you plan your next trip. In fact, if you use this information wisely, you can travel the world without spending a dime.

Awhile back, my mom–who travels more than 200 days per year in the medical research industry– begged me to let her set up all my frequent flyer programs and teach me how she has been traveling for free for the last 10 years. Finally, I agreed…and I’m glad I did.

What I’ve learned has saved me thousands of dollars in airline, hotel, and car rental fees, and I’m going to pass on my simple 3-step program for the right way to charge business expenses and how to travel the world for free.

1. Use An American Express Gold Card

Most people think the American Express Platinum Business Card is the way to go. Actually, for travelers it’s not. With AMEX Gold you get better points. You get 5,000 bonus points when you spend $20,000/year and 20,000 more bonus points when you spend $50,000/year. So if you charge $50,000 per year, you’ll get a free domestic ticket every year. With the AMEX Platinum, you don’t get this perk.

Another thing I like about AMEX is that their points never expire. You can have 700,000 points and guess what? They aren’t going anywhere.

One thing to remember about AMEX and their membership rewards is they have partnerships with 7 specific airlines: Delta, AirTran, Continental, Frontier, Jet Blue, Hawaiian, and Southwest. When it’s time to order tickets and transfer your points to the airline, simply call AMEX customer service and they’ll transfer them for you. The transfer is instant, so there’s no waiting around for your points to show up in your account.

2. Set Up Accounts With All Airlines And Hotels

This is the tedious part. Thank goodness my mom did it for me. I paid her fee of $399 to set this up and it was worth every penny. She even knew a few tricks to start out my Northwest Airlines account with 500 miles right off the bat. It would take someone who has no experience at least a week to do all this.

Basically, since my mom has over 12 years of national and international business travel experience under her belt, she has developed a solid system. She can set up accounts for all airlines, hotels, and rental cars in less than 8 hours, have it to you on a 1-page, 2-sided PDF with all of your Frequent Flyer numbers, Internet logins, customer service numbers, PIN codes, passwords, etc.

To hire my mom to do this for you, simply e-mail frequentflyerqueen@gmail.com, pay her crazy, low fee of $399 via Pay Pal, and wait about one week for your final document to arrive in your e-mail. Honestly, she will transform the way you look at travel the rest of your life. That’s a promise.

The reason you want to have accounts with every airline and hotel is because you never want to use your points at the AMEX website. Their prices and exchange rate are too high. You always want to transfer your points to an airline.

So to break it down, your new travel process goes like this:

> Use AMEX Gold For Business Purchases > Let AMEX Membership Reward Points Pile Up > Find A Flight pan > Call AMEX To Transfer Points To Your Preferred Airline > Fly Free!

3. Set Up A Separate Gmail Account At travel.yourname@gmail.com To Monitor Travel Deals

This is where it gets fun. When you have true freedom in your life–meaning you can make your own decisions concerning when you wake up, when you eat, what you do with your time, etc.–you can then maximize what I’m about to tell you to the fullest extent.

So, by now you’ve set up your separate Gmail account for travel at travel.yourname@gmail.com. This will help you set filters and prioritize your travel.

Now, go to every single airline site to sign up for their frequent flyer program and sign up for their e-mail promotions: American, Continental, United, Delta, British Airways, Qatar Airways, US Airways, Frontier etc. Do them all. Or, do like I did, and hire the “FrequentFlyerQueen” to do this tedious legwork for you at frequentflyerqueen@gmail.com.

Do the same with Hotels. Some great ones are Marriott Rewards, Starwood Preferred Guest, HHonors, Priority Club, etc. You can also do the same with all of the Rental Car companies: Hertz, Avis, National, Alamo, Enterprise, Budget, Thrifty, Dollar, etc. There’s more, but you get the point.

Finally, go to the websites below and sign up for each and every one of their e-mail promotions. Again, if your time is as valuable as mine, you want to give serious consideration to outsourcing this task as well.

- Side Step
- Qixo
- Fare Compare
- Smarter Travel
- Business Travel
- Kayak
- Travel Zoo
- Cheapo Air
- Sherman’s Travel

Now that you’ve signed up for everything you need to take advantage of the best deals on earth, you’re ahead of 98% of the population who whines and complains about never getting to travel.

You may be wondering why I didn’t mention Priceline or Expedia. It’s because from what I’ve heard from inside sources, they are owned by the airlines. You won’t get your best bargains there.

I also want to speak briefly about Fare Compare. This site isn’t affiliated with any airlines and isn’t biased like almost every other website you go to for airline tickets. This is my favorite site for research.

My favorite feature about Fare Compare is you can get specific alerts using any parameter you want. For example, if I want to fly first class to Frankfurt, Germany from Charleston, SC, I can have an alert set to e-mail me the moment the price drops. Keep in mind that many times a significant price drop in airfare may last for only minutes or hours on these crazy deals.

I absolutely have to mention Flyer Talk, a free web site that has an excellent frequent flyer forum. Another is Inside Flyer. Their forums are very active with up-to-the minute information relating to travel, specifically air travel. Unfortunately, to fully utilize this site, you have to become a paid member, but they do offer a few options for membership and it is well worth it.

Another free site with a decent frequent flyer forum is Frequent Flier. While all of these sites provide you with a wealth of information, the “flyertalk” and “insideflyer” sites are by far the ones with more cutting edge info.

At this point, my final recommendation is to go to this web site and download a free utility called the MilePort Mileage Manager: This cool little tool sits on your desktop and will retrieve all of your frequent flier account info, hotel frequent stay info, and tons of other points programs simultaneously from over 120 different online accounts.

That’s it! It really is that simple. If you have a business or even if you decide to use your AMEX for personal reasons, there will always be expenses that HAVE to happen.

With this information under your belt, there’s absolutely no reason you can’t start traveling for free like me. So what are you waiting for? Happy traveling!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 12:20 pm and is filed under Life Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.