First, welcome to my very first blog post! My name is Kylee and I’m a novice travel hacker who has decided to start a blog to share my adventures as I learn how to navigate the world of travel hacking. I stumbled upon this hobby through the Instagram algorithms when I started seeing more and more travel hacking reels pop up in my feed. I became more intrigued by the idea and started following various travel hacker influencers through social media and blog posts. What I learned was, that I had actually been doing some general travel hacking since 2017. That is when I opened my Citi Diamond card for a side hustle I had started and my Southwest personal credit card after speaking to a friend and learning how many free flights to Florida they had earned!

In 2017, my husband and I were celebrating our 10th wedding anniversary. We decided we were going to splurge and take a long-awaited trip to Hawaii! When I say splurge, I mean splurge, ocean front accommodations on both Oahu and Maui, excursions, dining etc. Another travel destination on my radar was Napa Valley and San Francisco. Since we live on the east coast, we had to fly to the west coast to get to Hawaii making this the perfect time to add a stopover in the bay area! The issue was we had splurged too much on the Hawaii part of our trip and didn’t really want to spend more for accommodations or car rental. Thanks to using my Citi card for my then side hustle, I had accumulated Citi Thank You Points which I discovered could pay for a 2 night hotel stay in Napa and a car rental. Sign me up! I had absolutely no idea about the various options I could have used to book that stay so I used the Citi Travel Portal (more discussion on what I’ve learned about travel portals and travel partners later) and booked 2 nights at a Hampton Inn and a car so we were going to stop over in Napa for free!

Fast forward to 2020. We had been using our Southwest card at that point for all of our daily/weekly expenses for the past 3 years. Due to some personal things that had come up, we had not really traveled anywhere from 2017 to 2020 so we had racked up over 100k points! We had experienced a loss and the pandemic had drained us since March so we decided to plan a family trip to Siesta Key with husband’s family to celebrate a 40th birthday. With the points we had accumulated, I was able to book 2 round trip tickets from our hub airport to Southwest Florida for just taxes and fees! I was so excited and honestly in a bit of disbelief. Since that time, my husband and I have taken 2 trips a year to Florida flying Southwest paying nothing but taxes and fees on our plane tickets. I didn’t know at the time there was a name for it, but I was officially travel hacking!

In June of 2022, after following various travel hackers online, I decided to open a card that would change everything! Between June of 2022 and June of 2023, my husband and I were able to accumulate over 300k points! My first goal when I decided to take the travel hacking leap, book a return trip to my favorite place, Hawaii! Instead of costing us over $10k like our last trip, I have accommodations for 9 days booked spending $0 and visiting 2 islands! I was also able to book a fully travel hacked trip to Sedona and Las Vegas in September of 2023. I’m working now towards booking buy one get one plane tickets through Southwest (I’ll explain this in more detail) for our Hawaii trip in August! We also have a weekend trip booked to Jacksonville in March to see The Players Championship at Sawgrass paying with points! I’m working on my spring break trip, possibly a fall trip for our anniversary and our next goal destination, Italy!

The best thing about travel hacking, there is no one way to do it! I’m going to talk about different ways I have accumulated and used points, but this hobby is totally customizable to fit your lifestyle! We are a married couple with no children so most of our trips adult focused for the two of us, but I have heard so many success stories of people travel hacking full family trips to dream destinations all over the world. Is your goal luxury accommodations, achievable! First class tickets to Europe, absolutely! Anything is truly possible!

I look forward to sharing my adventures with you!