Planning in Advance - A Big Money Saver

For now, we will be using the World Cup as our example, but I think this holds true for any major trip.

Plan in advance!! We began looking at flights, hotels, cars, etc. around 12-18 months in advance. This allowed us to do several things:

1. Save us a bunch of money.
2. Allowed us to get the hotel we wanted.
3. Let us stay in better locations.
4. Did I mention we saved a ton of money.

For example: The flight from Dallas to Johannesburg so far is costing around $2900 per person if you do a search on Kayak. That is $5800.00 for a couple just to fly coach!!

My wife and I started saving points through an airline credit card (we chose a Star Alliance airline) around 18 months in advance. We put everything on our card and paid it off. Towards the end, we had enough points for 2 coach tickets. We decided to splurge and bought extra points and spent an additional $1400.00 and now are flying business class! That savings of $4400.00 will be used towards the rest of our trip, which I will give you more details about later.

Now, there are many nuances to the credit cards, how to earn points, etc. and I will be explaining that more later, but know that you can fly well with little money.

Oh, and did I mention that a business class search on Kayak showed $7800 per ticket?

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