How I Flew My Family of Six to Costa Rica and Mexico at Christmastime for Free
I had an amazing opportunity to move to Fiji to be the head of the psychology department at the University of the South Pacific. While there, we had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to star in an episode of HGTV’s House Hunters International and you may have read my recent article about this: “What Was Real and What was Fake: The Inside Scoop on HGTV’s House Hunters International.” Anyway, my family and I had such a wonderful adventure living there in Fiji for several months, but my other business in real estate was difficult to manage from there and I was losing money on my investments. Also, our boys were struggling to adjust to the local Fijian schools so we made the difficult decision to move back to Utah.
Although we were all glad to be back, I knew that when the weather started getting cold, I was going to be missing Fiji and would need a tropical fix. So what did I do? I planned a trip to Costa Rica! Yet this was my first time living without a full-time professor salary and real estate takes time to ramp up. In fact, I didn’t make any money at all for 3 months. So I knew, given our financial situation, that I had to present an extremely compelling case to my wife for her to let us go on another trip abroad. I set to work, with my goal to actually make money by going to Costa Rica for three weeks with a family of six. Perhaps you are aware that the vast majority of trip expenses abroad are flights and housing. Hence, this was the focus of my efforts. In this article I will focus on making all your flights free and next time I will discuss how you can make your housing free or even make money on housing while you’re traveling!
How to get Anywhere in the World for Free
Here are a few steps I followed to making sure that the six of us could fly to Costa Rica for free over the most expensive time of the year — the Christmas holidays. An initial search suggested that flights from our home in Salt Lake City, Utah to San Jose, Costa Rica would cost about $900 a ticket or about $5,400 for our family. I knew that this kind of expense wasn’t going to “fly” with my wife, so I knew that I needed to employ some of the strategies that I write about in my book See the World on Any Budget that I can send you for free if you type your email in this secure link. Here’s the basics of how you can go anywhere without spending a dime.
- Sign up for Travel Awards Cards
The first step to getting free airfare is to sign up for travel awards cards. So many people sell themselves short to get 1% cash back or other little bonuses. If you look closely, you get a lot more bang for your buck (like double) what the other cards give. Sure, you have to use it for travel, but if you are reading this article, this should definitely be your priority. In fact, I have four of them! I would do some google searches and see who is having really nice sign-up incentives as you can often get one or even two plane tickets just for signing up! We put all our family and business expenses on these cards (then we pay the cards off each month with our checking account) and we were able to book all of our tickets through these cards, paying for taxes only (so I suppose it wasn’t 100% free). However, even when using the point systems, you’ve got to keep the cost per ticket way down using the strategies below.
2. Chunk Down your Travel Path to Find the Cheapest Routes
The best way that I’ve found to find the cheapest route is to plug in where you live and where you want to go and then start looking at all the different routes to get there. What are the hub cities that you’ll fly through? Then, estimate your costs to drive or fly separately to that hub city and compare prices. I usually find that if I book the flight segments separately it’s a lot cheaper. In the Costa Rica example I found that there were some really cheap flights to San Jose out of Denver and Las Vegas. Since I have a large family, it was much more cost effective for us to simply drive to and park in Vegas (6 hours) than to pay for 6 tickets to fly there. It only cost about $280 to drive and by doing this and the next step we saved about $400 per ticket or $2,400. Every situation will be different, and if you are traveling by yourself, adding an extra drive probably won’t be worth it. However, you could still save a lot by booking the two legs of your journey separately. It’s going to take a little poking around, but you can save so much by doing this!
3. Use Kayak to Determine the Cheapest Dates I use www.kayak.com because they bring together all the other search engines and I’ve just found I get the best deals with them. If your dates are at all flexible, make sure that you click on “flexible dates” and look at 3 days before and 3 days after as this will show you the best possible day to leave and when to come back. Match up the cheapest routes that you found in step 2 with the cheapest dates and then book using your credit card points. By applying these strategies, I found we were able to get tickets to Costa Rica in the peak season for just over $500 each! Even though I used my card points, you naturally use a lot fewer points the lower the cost per each ticket, so you want to follow this step to keep the prices down.
4. Add a Bonus Country
One thing that I always like to do is to add a free trip to another country on the way to my final destination. Many airlines offer itineraries with long, even 24–36 hour stops in another country and so you can go explore for the day without paying additional flight charges. For instance, we have gone to France on our way to Russia and Turkey on my way from Egypt to Israel. The good news is that most people don’t want a long layover like that and so these itineraries can actually be among the least expensive. Mexico City was on my bucket list, and so when I saw an itinerary with a 24-hour layover in Mexico City on the way back from Costa Rica, I just couldn’t resist.
One caveat though was that the bonus country strategy can be a bit exhausting and may not be ideal for those who depend on sufficient sleep or for families with young children. We had to wake up at 3 a.m. to make our flight out of Costa Rica and then at 4:30 the next morning out of Mexico City — so, I ended up seeing a lot of Mexico City by myself while the family rested in the hotel. It was well worth it though as Mexico City far exceeded my expectations — it’s like the New York City of Latin America!
Conclusion
If I had booked the flights from Salt Lake City in the traditional manner, it would have cost about $900 per ticket. Of course, I did spend about $80 in gas, $120 for parking and $85 for a hotel to get to Vegas. Thus, using the strategies above saved me approximately $5,400 minus the $285 for the drive to Vegas, creating a net savings of $5,115! Not too shabby if I do say so myself! This wasn’t enough though in my quest to convince my wife because she’s aware that housing is the other big expense when traveling. To really make my case, I knew I would need to not only show her that we could stay for three weeks for free, but that we could make money by leaving — a pretty tall order! Find out next time how I was able to pull this off in my article, “How my Family Stayed in Costa Rica for Three Weeks and Made $1000 on Housing.” Until then, I have an entire section on making transportation cheap for your trip in my book See the World on Any Budget! I’ll email you a free digital copy of my book, all you need to do is type your email in this secure link.
