What is Travel? and is Travel Free?

Is travel free? Yes. Free, freeing and at the very least, cheap.

Before we say that travel is or isn’t free, we have to accurately determine the actual cost of travel and to do this, one must first define “travel”.

Travel is inherently free

In it’s very nature, travel is free. Why? because travel is seeing a new place and a new culture. It is to go from one place to another. It has few restrictions. It is not seeing China, it is not seeing Brazil… but it is going someplace.

This is not to be confused with transport.  In the frequent flyer world, there is an idea that travel is transport. Really? Then First Class is travel?

I beg to differ. In my opinion, you could spend a week on a plane, knock 5 countries off of your “traveled to” list and still have never traveled. Maybe Lucky would disagree, and I say different strokes. But I don’t want to go to Sri Lanka and only see the Hilton. I want to go to Sri Lanka and see the inside of a real person’s home. I want to see what a Sri Lankan eats and eat with them.

If travel is transport, then that is the start of our disagreement. Travel is not luxury, hotels, or transport in a Porsche…

Travel is not going to Sri Lanka; it’s being in Sri Lanka.

I’m passionate about this as I think travel is the cure to what is wrong in the world. (Big statement, I know). Hate and fear are caused by an “us vs. them” mentality. The news drums it up for great stories, politicians drum it up to unite “us” and we believe it because of fear, and because it’s unknown.

Travel is Freeing

Travel teaches us what behavioral studies try to- people are the same. People aren’t any more likely to cheat, lie, steal or harm one another in any specific place or culture. Although there are a number of reasons you could get this impression based on what cultures value (according to Dan Ariely), people are the same. Even my enemies are acting out of fear and protection for those they love.

My enemies are men, like me.

People are essentially motivated by the same things. And while people are all the same in this way, all equally prone to good in my opinion, cultures are so different. Religion, individuality, nature; it’s different all over the world. And I’m sorry, but Park Hyatt’s are all the same. First Class cabins are all the same. I mean really! Different food, different width and cushion… but that’s not travel, it’s transport.

If you think getting to Sri Lanka is travel, agree to disagree. I call it transport. If you think the point of travel is the flight to Sri Lanka… then… well I’m not sure what to say. But, I would say you are missing out on what each culture has to teach.

I go to go and be changed. To me, that is freeing.

The price of travel is free ($0)

If you’ve been doing the miles and points thing for years and can’t figure out how to get a free flight or free hotel for a vacation, absolutely free… then again, we disagree on some fundamental things. But seriously, you must have a bad credit score and no innovation if this is the case.

Whoa, whoa, I’m not saying you should never spend money on miles or points or transport. I’m not saying I don’t. Instead, I’m saying that if it was your kind of thing, you could book a two week vacation for free. Most people only have two weeks. And it would be a huge upgrade for most people. The hotels you can book with points are with chains we never would have stayed at growing up.

“Well, uh, you still have to pay fuel surcharges and taxes.”

First of all, I do not book flights with fuel surcharges. Come on, if you hadn’t used your Lufthansa miles on Swiss instead of USA, you wouldn’t have had to pay fuel surcharges. You just wouldn’t. That was a choice. I know tons of people use the BA companion pass on First Class.

All I have to say to that is, “you can go broke saving money”. Wow for $1,000+ a person… Sorry, you lost me there. Seriously, last year I had many friends get in on the $399 roundtrip ticket to Istanbul (some not even miles/points people). That is a good deal.

I’m sorry, my ego doesn’t need escorts, a 1:3 flight attendant to passenger ratio, fancy food, people addressing me by name, $200 champagne and I definitely would never spend $1000 more to have a flat seat instead of an economy seat. For 10 hours, I can survive. And come on, it’s not a bed, it’s a seat that goes flat. Not worth the money, IMO.

Personally, I don’t book flights with fuel surcharges. Seriously. I’ve booked  many flights with UA, AA and USA miles and have never paid fuel surcharges. I’ve also booked using British Airways Avios and only paid YQ on tiny intra-Asia flights. So I paid $100 on a JAL flight but I think that’s it. But most of my Avios have been used in South America or domestically.

Regarding taxes… give me a break. The airport taxes? Just use your Barclay or Cap1 points for that instead of a nice hotel. Seriously, if you wanted to, you could be out the door with all your airline fees covered by a card, and all hotels covered with points.

For two weeks, it would be super easy.

Defining travel expenses

Even if I say you could pay with points, hitchhike, couchsurf or list anything else free, someone will say something like ,”well you still have to pay for food.”

*blinks*

What the heck kind of logic is this?

Since when did I say food is free? (although I haven’t paid for it in a week because of the nice lounge here). And since when are food and travel the same thing?

Of course you have to pay for living expenses, just as you still need to breath.

Better yet, let me point out how insane this logic is by saying this:

If I said, “I paid $200,000 for my home” you wouldn’t say, “yea, but that doesn’t include food.” Of course not, food is not a home expense, it’s a living expense. Certainly the cost of living will vary from place to place but it’s not a home expense.

Saying “you still have to pay for food” is no different than saying “you still have to pay for toothpaste or socks”.

Instead, people are trying to compare this to something like asking how much your dog costs. One could claim they’d gotten a free dog, but we’d all just be thinking “yea but vet bills and dog food and that stuff adds up!” And judging that as not truly free, would be correct.

Travel is not like this.

The difference you would point out to that dog owner is the before and after expenses. Period. Before owning a dog you would not have to buy dog food, and now you do. But with travel for some reason before and after logic, or logic in general, goes out the window.  You had to buy food before you traveled and when you travel, yes, you still have to buy food.

Many of the expenses people attribute to travel are expenses you would have had anyways.

And here’s why people have this mis-association, and actually, they get it from a reasonable association based on how much they pay on vacation. I’m certain. Because it is a before and after of comparisons and for most people the “living expenses” increased and are directly attributed to the travel.

That’s reasonable.

And here is why I think people react to the name travel is free (they do): Because they think about how much money they paid on their last vacation. Even if they paid with miles. For most people the cost is still high. After all they paid for the points by buying gift cards, they paid cash and points on the hotel, and they ate at the hotel restaurant.

So I think even the big dogs in the miles and points game are offended because they still spent a lot of money on their last trip. And the point is, the before and after costs, compared to living at home, went up a lot.

So before you say that travel isn’t free, can we at least agree to base that standard on A) travel expenses and B) only include living expenses if those living expenses go up directly because of travel?

Can we at least meet in the middle and say that only an increase in food prices can contribute to the costs of travel? It’s very reasonable and you can still show your bill at the hotel to prove that it went up, I don’t mind that. But lets be reasonable.

Agreed?

Good.

But what if those expenses went down as you traveled?

Let me share that we are keeping track of every single expense, travel and not travel and here’s what we found:

That our expenses (total and living expenses) have decreased and our standard of living has increased quite a bit. We will post all of our expenses and show how we do it. And what we’re doing is living on less than $20,000 in a year. Travel, food, motorcycle rentals, boat trips, kayaking, fondue, champagne, park passes, museum tickets, toiletries, hobbies, online courses, etc…

Our life has included a lot of things and despite the increase of activities our expenses have gone down. This is undoubtedly due to collecting miles and points. I will say, I do not regularly do the manufactured spending thing. And I probably have less miles than many. This means I’m very likely to pay for domestic flights. At least lately, I decided to buy all our intra Europe flights (which added up!). This is relatively abnormal, although I did buy many flights within Asia when we were there, but they were a lot cheaper.

So if travel isn’t free, and if it’s not free because of a rise in expenses… then what is it when expenses go down?

And in the end, I’ll concede a few things:

1) Living is not free. Food is not free, unless you are a beggar or thief. Similarly, deodorant, toothpaste, medicine… all these things are there whether you travel or not.

This also means they aren’t travel expenses.

2) I still pay for things that are travel expenses. I have bought flights in order to save miles and I pay for hotels in order to get points.

My main point is that unless you’re going to the Maldives, you can get a free flight and free hotel. And you could travel without increasing living expenses.  Two weeks is about what most people have for vacation and especially for two weeks, it should be easy.

Conclusion

Let me recap my thoughts.

Travel is free because of what travel is. There are some places that charge for visas, but I say your definition of travel is narrow. Like traveling to China isn’t free, transport or being there. But for the most part, you are allowed to go where you want.

It’s primitive if you think about it. But maybe I should clarify that I mean travel is free in the sense that you are free to go somewhere… but also, travel is inherently without cost of money. Perhaps this should have been clarified earlier.

It would be free to walk across your country, but it would cost a ton of time. And that’s the back bone of my philosophy. Because I’ll tell you what, I had this philosophy long before I knew what a frequent flyer mile was. And in a not-so roundabout way the number of the dollar sign below your name, represents your time.

And for those of you with little value of time, you can walk, right?

But people who do value their time still get into this hobby because they can get a valuable plane ticket by taking the time to fill out a credit card application, or even by being strategic about spending. In fact, just the other day, someone commented saying they not only have earned millions but financially they are in the green on the miles and points thing.

So saying you can’t get a free flight is insane, imo. I think people are just bitter because I say my flight was free (of money, as the fee was covered by a voucher), they think about the fuel surcharge on the first class flight. And that’s your decision, and it’s not wrong to spend your miles that way. It’s not, do what you will. And let me fly economy. :-p

Finally…

Tomorrow we announce our plan to post expenses

The before and after expense is what I’d like to close with. We’ve decided to start posting every expense starting with this past August 1st. Travel and non-travel, because the other stuff could be relevant. And regardless of whether or not we spend more on food, or transport… we spend a lot less money overall now that we’re traveling.

$20,000 as a couple is what we’re aiming for. And let me say two things. 1) $20k means we could be on pretty much every gov’t social program including food stamps (we’re not btw). For a couple it’s considered poverty. But 2) we live a fairly luxurious lifestyle. I mean, we’ll post every hotel we stay in too, and it’s been a while since we’ve had a stay in a hotel less than 4 stars.

Yet, we’re a mix of super cheap as well and adventurous. On some things I’m incredibly frugal. I’ll take a $.10 bus (or attempt to in Kiev) instead of paying $20 for a taxi if I have time. Yet, we’ve hitchhiked long distances for the adventure. We love it actually, until we get tired of it. 😀

And yet, the <$20,000 a year includes boat rides, fondue dinners, motorcycle rentals, etc…  Oh… but, yea, we’ll talk about that more tomorrow.

The point here, is that $20,000 includes an increase in luxury and a decrease in cost. So it begs the question, how much of the $20k is living expenses, unavoidable things like food. And how much is travel. We plan to find out.

But it begs a greater question- let’s assume our lifestyle (food and hobby) remains similar. And yet the cost of our being alive in a year goes down… what does this say about the cost of travel?

I’m trying to say that travel is saving us money. So in some regards it may appear that we are spending more on flights, but we could be saving on food, transportation as a whole and where we rest our head. I can 100% tell you we spend less on hotels in a year than we did on rent. By a lot.

So let’s just say we had no travel expenses and our food and living expenses remained the same for a year (it won’t, we’ll have paid flights and hotels but just what if…). Then logically we could say, “okay, that’s an example of someone doing travel for free”. But if the food expenses go down enough that they more than make up for the travel expenses, what do we call that? Travel is profitable?

Unfortunately the domain name for “travel lowers your living expenses” is taken, so I’ll stay at travelisfree.com

So that was a heck of a rant, but more to come tomorrow. But I want this post to be first. Why? Well, I want the debate for “is travel free?” to go here.

And here it is… I imagine people don’t give a darn about the hippy dippy philosophy of it. But, anyone agree or disagree on the travel expenses part? Can you earn miles for free? Can you book flights for free? If so, I’d like examples. If you don’t think it can be done for free, why not?