Travelhacking my way to Brussels

A few years ago, a friend introduced me to travelhacking, which basically is strategically accumulating frequent flyer miles for as cheap as possible. He talked me into getting an American Airlines Citi Mastercard, which at the time was running a promo where you'd get 100k miles for free. The catch? Spend $10k in 3 months, and deal with a $450 annual fee.

After I signed up, I decided I hated travelhacking, but I managed to pull it off. It had some really good perks- Admiral's Club lounge access, Global Entry fees waived, free bags and priority boarding. I basically paid all my friends back in amazon gift cards for months for like, dinner. I also prebought giftcards for places like Target and Amazon, knowing I'd eventually use them up. Then I forgot about the miles.

Originally the miles seemed appealing because we do travel quite a bit, and fly international sometimes. The bigger drawback is that while 100k miles is great for one person, I'm usually flying with other people. So the miles sat, and sat, and sat.

Then I got an email last week saying that the miles would expire unless I gave them more money. My convention schedule this year included flights to Altanta and Seattle, so I started looking at the reward flights for those. The trips were awful- but DragonCon is such a huge convention that I wasn't totally surprised.

I looked at redeyes, and at flying in earlier. People fly less mid-week, so that's one of my tricks to book flights. I ended up padding my trip a few days to see friends and family in the area and got a free flight out to Atlanta. Then I checked my Starwood card, and realized that I had enough points to get a hotel room a couple blocks from the convention in a really fancy hotel. This was shocking- hotel rooms sell out so quickly for that con that I'm in a facebook group whose sole purpose is pairing people who have space in their rooms or have to get rid of their reservation. I snatched that up. 40k points for a week at Aloft.

For months, I had been wanting to check out Revision, a demoparty in Europe. I'll explain the ansi scene and demo scene in some other post, but basically I wanted to go hang out with a bunch of vintage art nerds, and we don't have events like this in America.

This particular event was in Saarbrücken, which seemed to be a smaller town in Germany. It recommended flying into Frankfurt, but I was pretty behind on being able to get into their shuttle program. I started looking at cities around the city- Luxembourg, Strasbourg, and Brussels. I also used American's flight finder to find award travels for what I was willing to spend - that helped me narrow the cities down quite a bit. I also cross referenced commuter airlines and trains, to see if I could find a combination that still kept the flight down.

I ended up with a flight in to Brussels, that leaves late on a Wednesday. It has an 8hour layover in London, where I plan to meet up with my friend to eat pudding at a bar. Then I'm on a short flight to Brussels, and catch a ride down to Germany. I was able to book that for $100 and 55,000 points.

The way back I dumped the rest of my SPG points (I probably spent more on the fancy hotel). 50,000 points with no taxes or fees.

The trip back has a 6 hour layover in Moscow, and then a 12 hour flight back to LA on Aeroflot. I've never flown that airline, so not entirely sure what to expect other than I'll likely just sleep the whole time.

I'm really excited about going on a random trip, and the whole thing was super last minute. I'm excited to compete in an art competition, and to meet up with my Fuel packmates. I'll post more my adventures here!

(photos also by me)