Just booked our tickets to London. British Airways 0192 from DFW to LHR. No turning back now. Not that we would anyway. EVER! We decided we want to get into London a few extra days early. At least 2 of us haven’t been to London before, so we’re definitely going to frolic around and see some sights. Plus we’ll have plenty of time for last minute anything rally related.
Travel tip to any future rallyers from the US: The single biggest out of pocket expense for 1+ people is plane tickets. Flying into London during the summer is peak time, so tickets are $$$ – ours priced at a little shy of $1700/pp. However we only paid $287 per person. How you ask? Don’t worry, I’ll feed you baby birds.
While the spirit of the rally seems to be a general fuck it no planning attitude, the reality is a decent amount needs to be done ahead of time. If you give yourself enough ahead of time you can take of advantage of this: credit cards. Before you scoff at my potential fiscal irresponsibility, listen up because you’re about to get schooled. I’m not talking about getting into debt at all. Some credit cards offer insane sign up bonuses for certain types of points, some of which are more valuable than others with better redeem-ability. The Chase Sapphire Reserve card I have offered a 100k points bonus for Chase ultimate rewards points. Those points can transfer directly to British Airways for instance, and at the time of this writing a one way ticket in July costs 25000 BA points. So I used 75k of my points for plane tickets, and now we can worry about other things we have to spend money on.
Side note/general life advice if you like to travel: If you’re responsible enough to utilize a credit card, I highly recommend using one for absolutely everything. I used to use my debit card for everything as I thought I was being responsible and only spending money that I have. You can do the same thing credit card as long as you do this: pay off your entire bill every month. Every month, no matter what. I still carry my debit card as a backup, but I stopped using it 3 years ago. Since then I’ve gotten round trip first class airfare for 2 to Germany, a separate round trip ticket to London in March, a week’s worth of hotels in Germany, some free domestic flights here and there as well as other misc travel perks, and now I’ve saving $1400 on a plane ticket. And I have ZERO credit card debt. There’s a super handy website that can break down what cards are best for what purpose. So do yourself a favor and check out www.thepointsguy.com
