Why Travel Hacking is Better Than Extreme Couponing

The easiest explanation for how travel hacking works is just to simply describe it as “the extreme couponing of travel.” It’s a heck of a lot easier than actually explaining how I got the 100,000 miles British Airways credit card, bought tons of one dollar coins from the US Mint for the miles and how they had unlimited stopovers allowing me to book stops in Peru, Santiago, and Miami on my way to Easter Island. It’s just a mouthful and nowadays it’s just easier to compare travel hacking to extreme couponing.

I have a confession though. I have dabbled in the dark art of extreme couponing. When double coupon week rolled around at the local Harris Teeter I may have printed off a ton of few coupons. The similarities are actually striking in that, for example, they are both legal and by-the-rules kind of techniques that few people take full advantage of. The companies let us do it because we give free press and they make money on the remaining majority of people who don’t take the time to get the deal.

But the real difference between the two is that extreme couponing is a waste of time. To elaborate more, I actually made a list of the differences between extreme couponing and travel hacking.

• Cheez-its are worth $2.50.
  vs.
  A First Class flight on Cathay Pacific is $20,000.
• Couponers can be found on peopleofwalmart.com stockpiling gum.
  vs.
  Travel Hackers can be found reviewing hotels like the Ritz Carlton Central Park, InterContinental Hong Kong, Park Hyatt Shanghai, Park Hyatt Tokyo, Conrad New York, InterContinental Fiji, Grand Hyatt Santiago, The Radisson Blu Sydney, etc…
• Couponers end up with trunks of deodorant and have to rent an extra room for those trunks.
  vs.
  Travel hackers have a wallet of rewards cards and end up having credit scores in the top 5%.
• The best part of a couponer’s day is when the price goes from $86 to $13.
  vs.
  The best part of travel hacking is when your Singapore Airlines seat turns into a bed.
• Couponers eat “breakfast hot pockets” because they were on sale.
  vs.
  Travel hackers eat breakfast in the executive lounge because they’re platinum members.
• Doesn’t Extreme Couponing come on the same channel as the people who eat light bulbs and hoard cats?
  vs.
  … no counter point needed.

In the end, very few people take the time to master the art of free travel or free groceries… but I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to take the time for free travel. Extreme couponing gets you 5 gallons of toothpaste that will take up a room worth way more than the tooth paste. But with travel hacking, you can do very simple things to earn enough miles for first class flights on the finest airlines to exotic locations. Flights that are worth $20,000 can be had for next to nothing, if not nothing. Really, why wouldn’t you take the time to rack up at least a few hundred-thousand miles?

Seriously though, the same people who would rather just pay for a flight than take the time are missing out. I can’t say the same for cheez-its. You could pay $2.50 for cheez-its and save yourself an hour of scowering coupons. Right? But with travel hacking, an hour of research (or 10 minutes to simply email us), can get you a $1,000 flight to Europe.

Maybe my comparison would better look like this:

• I do not even want 25 containers of mustard in my bedroom.
  vs.
  I would like my bedroom to be in Guam and come with room service, food in the lounge and a rain shower.
• I would not have paid for hot pockets anyways.
  vs.
  I would actually like a vacation to Europe.
• It’s still the show that comes on before the show with people hoarding dead cats.

Don’t get me wrong, every once in a while a couponer strikes big and takes quite the bounty of diapers home. Like in this photo:

Wait.

That looks so familiar. Oh, I remember. It reminds me of a van we saw in the third world country, Cambodia.

Oh, and the same day we saw this:

I’m pretty sure they don’t have a Harris Teeter or Kroger in Phnom Penh but someone obviously just got in on a good mattress deal. All that is fine, nothing wrong with getting deals. But for those of us in the USA who have incredible opportunities, two words – “opportunity cost”. The hours you spend cutting out coupons and filling your cart with deodorant could be spent racking in free flights to awesome locations and getting free luxury hotels.

And the same logic can’t be used against the free travel game unless you make hundreds of dollars an hour and/or have no desire to leave your neighborhood. Which is fine if you do, then because of your “opportunity cost”, your time would be better spent making money or not worrying about travel hacking.

The obvious conclusion is that your time would better be spent travel hacking than couponing or doing neither. After all, isn’t travel more freeing than TLC or cheez-its? I can’t possibly understand how extreme couponing is worth more than minimum wage.

My final point is that travel hacking is just way better than couponing and here’s why: the way we should figure out the value of our savings is by how much we would have spent on groceries and how much we would have spent on a vacation. See my guess is couponers still spend $100 a week on groceries, they just get way more cheez-its. See my flight to Bali would have cost $1,500+ but it was like $25. I actually saved $1,475 and a couponer actually saved $0. Yes, you did get more stuff which has value, same with Cathay Pacific First Class having extra value, but that’s not what you would have spent anyways and is therefore not savings.

Wait, I just found out next week is triple coupon week at Harris Teeter. Forget everything I just said. Spaghetti dinner with juice boxes at my house in two weeks and anyone is invited!

What do you think? How do you determine the value, by savings according to how much you would have paid or by how much it would have cost at full price? And can couponing be worthwhile?