My Version Of Not Traveling: Hacking Austin, TX

In April Carrie and I did the unthinkable and put full time travel on pause and we stayed in one place for an entire month. A whole month without taking a flight or stamping a passport. Crazy, right?

In a month you can almost know what it feels like to be a normal person. Living in one place allows you to start to have routines and there’s the added perk of your family actually knowing what time zone you’re in for calling/communicating. Since we’re both super social, the cool part is that you can actually spend time with friends.

But the point of this post is the deals we found in Austin, TX. Hacks that translate to many cities, for the most part. Apparently some of the miles and points deal skills translates to actually living somewhere.

Hotels

I’ll quick mention the hotel situation. We spent most of our time at the Radisson in Austin. We booked using points, and it is 44,000 points a night, but we booked before the 2-4-1 credit card benefit went away. So we booked 2 nights at a time for the entire month. Which was funny/awkward sometimes to have to run down and recheck in every 2 days. Amazingly, only one person in the entire hotel knew or noticed that we were staying there for a month. Most of them would welcome us and say, “looks like you’ll be with us for two nights”.

Either way, we didn’t actually pay cash for any of our hotels during the entire stay, although we did have to hop hotels a couple times when the Radisson was sold out. We did check out the InterContinental for free with a BRG and a couple of other hotels like the Country Inn & Suites. But the large majority of the time was spent at the Radisson.

 

Hacking car2go

One thing people in Austin kept recommending to me was Car2Go. This is a super cool concept on it’s own. There are a bunch of Smart cars all over the city and if you have a membership, you can walk right up to the Car2Go car, scan your key thing and drive away. They only charge you per minute of driving and for the initial sign up.

It’s only $0.41 per minute, which means that a 10 minute drive to the grocery store would be $4.10. There are hourly and day prices as well and a onetime $35 registration fee.

But the best part is that you can just leave the car wherever you want. You simply check the app to find cars near you and again, you only pay per minute. You never have to buy gas.

Free car2go minutes

Here’s where it gets interesting. They leave a credit card in the car for gas only. So if you’re out and need gas, you can refuel for completely free.

If you are in a hurry, you can easily pick a car that has plenty of gas. After all the map and app show what percentage the gas tank is at before you even go to the car. So why should you ever refuel?

If the car is below 25% full, you can refuel using the car2go credit card (left in the car for you) and they will add 20 minutes to your account for you.

But since it has to be below 25% to refuel and get credit, you can use the app/map that allows you to see the gas percentage on a car, you can purposely pick a car that is low on gas.

In other words, when you need to drive somewhere, pick the car below 25% gas, take a few minutes to refuel and get 20 minutes of driving for free.

It doesn’t credit your account with a ton of extra time, but it is enough for a couple free rides. Plus, you can do it when you would have been with a car anyways.

If you only did 10 minute rides and refilled every other time, you could seriously have all your rides free within the city.

 

BCycle bike sharing plan

I love biking and saving money, so the bike share system is one of my favorite inventions. Renting through other bike sites can often be $30 a day, but most bike share systems only charge $10 a month. In this case It’s $11 a month + a onetime $15 fee. So one month ended up costing us $26. But in 25 days of actually using the bikes, we can honestly say we got our money’s worth.

In 25 days I took 76 rides on the bike, riding a total of 114.62 miles. Which oddly enough made me 14 on the list of BCycle members in Austin in terms of miles.

 

Staying within 30 minutes

A lot of people are worried about the 30 minute per ride thing. See, with your membership, you get 30 minutes free and if you go over that you pay another $4 per 30 minutes. However, I want to note a few things about that.

First thing to note is that it is pretty hard to go over 30 minutes of riding within the city.

We would often ride from the center of town to the park west of town (where I’d play Ultimate frisbee) and it would only take 15 minutes. Similarly we went to the station furthest east to go to the HEB grocery store and it would take 15 minutes. For the first many rides I started a timer, but I eventually stopped worrying about it.

If you do start to go over dock and recheck out the bike. You get 30 minutes at a time, but as many rides as you want.

The times where we would have gone over were joy riding. For example we went along the river bike path heading east where there are no stations. We wouldn’t have made the entire trip in one go so we redocked before leaving the last station and redocked as soon as we got back. Not a big deal.

One thing that is neat about bike sharing is that often the annual membership allows you to check out bikes in multiple cities.  There are different networks for bikeshares, so don’t assume that the two cities you could use it in are under the same plan.

 

TabbedOut

I don’t want to go into the food scene in Austin, but I’ll mention the app TabbedOut.  This app allows you to close and pay your tab at restaurants on your phone. No waiting on the waiter/waitress. Just click pay.

The amazing thing is that it gives a signup bonus of $10 off a bill, and it has month promotions. And while we were there, one of the promotions was to pay with a Citi card and you got something like $20. And this was per phone. So we had a few meals (like an okay sushi place) that were completely free.

I believe it started as an Austin thing, so it’s pretty widely used there, but it has spread to other cities. Check it out.

 

Uber and Lyft

Another way to get free rides is Uber and Lyft. I’ve already written about Uber plenty already so I won’t go on and on about this but, we definitely used Uber to get from one hotel to another. You’re supposed to only get one account per phone number, but anyways… if you’re interested check out my links:

• Free Uber credits
• Free Lyft credits

 

Bus to the airport

This is hardly a hack but Austin is super cool in that a bus goes from Austin to the Airport and only costs $1.75. I took it from Congress, right outside the Radisson hotel, and it took less than 30 minutes. Pretty direct and given how far it is, $1.75 is a steal.

And while Austin doesn’t have a huge airport they have the major airlines, so you can totally use any set of miles to get to and from there.

 

Conclusion

A month in Austin is hardly enough to feel like we lived there, but it was definitely a lot of fun and the time flew by. But the experience reminds me that you can find deals with anything, not just travel. Extreme coupon-ing and miles and points are two popular areas where people have scaled tactics… or maybe blogs can just profit from publicizing the deals. Also, food and travel are huge categories. But if you’re willing to look, there are deals for anything.

I often say, anything can be hacked. Even Austin.