Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

Soundtrack for this newsletter: NIKI - Every Summertime

Spotify

Apple Music

It seems like COVID’s effects on travel are maybe, hopefully, fully gone.

The days of pre-flight testing, on-arrival rapid testing, and 3-days-after-arrival-somehow-costing-$200-additional-covid-test are gone. Anyone that’s traveled to Asia in the past year knows exactly what I’m talking about. There were the online tracing and tracking forms, and the pre-departure QR codes and the checking in and out apps that would know your location at all times.

Good riddance to it all.

So much paperwork. So many steps. Goodbye, and good riddance.

Just a little over a year ago, in Singapore,

I know, these policies had their reasons, and it kept a lot of people safe, healthy, and alive. And they allowed us to travel, in a time when it didn’t seem possible. It was all no doubt necessary, even if looking in the rear view mirror kinda makes it feel a bit theatrical and over the top.

In the last couple of months, we’ve been to some places where masks are still worn by maybe 30% of the population. Aside from that, we haven’t seen any COVID-related forms, tests, or quarantine requirements. All of that has thankfully, and hopefully come to an end, and it seems the way we all travel has gone back to pretty much the same way it was before COVID came.

Well, everything except the price.

The costs are rising. Like the plane, see? With all the money around it? (I’m so sorry.)

Flights that were normally $500 are now $1200.

Hotels that, just a few months ago, cost $40 per night are now $100.

A dorm bed in a hostel is the same cost that a hotel was a few months ago.

And the backpack that you were once able to carry on for free now somehow costs $55 because it was 0.5lb over the weight limit.

It’s not your imagination - despite all the restrictions being lifted, travel feels more expensive than ever.

So what’s causing the cost of travel to skyrocket like Elon’s latest SpaceX attempt?

These AI image generation tools have gotten out of control.

Well, first of all, there’s “revenge travel”—that buzzword that was going around for a while. (That I actually detest, because shouldn’t travel be coupled with a more positive sounding word? Like…excitement travel…what’s the opposite of revenge? Forgiveness? I digress…)

There’s a record demand for travel—it turns out over half of all US adults plan to travel for leisure in the next 6 months.

The price of oil globally has shot up about 75%.

Record (in a bad way) inflation is hitting just about everywhere.

Boeing and Airbus had substantial manufacturing delays as a result of COVID, so there’s just straight up not enough airplanes. Airlines let go of record amounts of staff during the pandemic, and are struggling to rehire to meet the demand. People are demanding higher cleaning standards for the hotels they stay in which is increasing costs.

Basically, it’s a perfect storm of global economic problems, some of the holdover effects of the pandemic, and an increasing desire to get out into the world.

Nothing like a little bit of bad news to kick off this summer.

All of that leads to flight and hotels costs rising up to 32% across the board.

Yet, in the midst of all of that, we decided to hop on a plane for our next round of travels (promising ourselves for the umpteenth time that we wouldn’t travel in the summer time again). And, almost everywhere we’ve been so far shows signs that travel is back and is not slowing down.

So…how is everyone (including us) traveling in spite of the ballooning costs?

For us, it’s about having the right tools and some flexibility.

The holy trinity of travel-money-saving.

For flights - it’s all about having a nice stockpile of points to use. Flight costs may have gone through the roof, but the cost of a point award redemption is still the exact same as it was 3 years ago (for the most part).

If you want to learn how to do this, we have a skillshare course that teaches you, 1 free month, blah blah blah, you know the drill by now :)

https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

Timing is also crucial. The typical advice was to book domestic flights 1-2 months before you want to go, and to book international flights 3-7 months before. But that advice doesn’t always apply anymore—sometimes the best deals are unpredictable.  

When I say timing is crucial, I mean being ready at any moment to book that once-in-a-lifetime flight deal. We use a service like Going.com (used to be called Scott’s Cheap Flights… I know, I haven’t, and probably will never, adjust to that new name) to send us email alerts whenever one of those pops up. Many of these deals have to be scooped up within hours, but the flights themselves usually can be taken many months later. So if we see a good deal to a place we’ve always wanted to visit, we do our best to predict our lives 8 months out and book them within 30 minutes of getting the alert.

It requires a mix of spontaneity, commitment and flexibility, but we’ve saved thousands of dollars over the years by jumping on these deals the moment they show up in our inbox.

True story—pre YouTube life, Lisa and I were a just a couple of months into dating when I got the above alert for $500 RT flights to New Zealand. I called Lisa immediately, she was excited. We’d be going 8 months from then. She spiraled and immediately went to worse case scenario—“that’s a really long time from now…what if… will we still be together? we will be, right?”

Good news—5 years later, we are. :) And that trip, on the Abel Tasman coast, was when we got engaged.

Next up - hotels. 

Points are not as much of a game changer here, unfortunately. Moving Chase points to Hyatt is still the only game in town worth playing, but the hotels have increased the point costs so much so that, unless you’re really in a bind or if you want to have a ballin’ outta control hotel experience, points don’t make much sense to save money on hotels.

Our go-to is usually to book with Agoda in Asia, and Booking.com in Europe, and every now and then, check hotels.com. It sometimes helps to use the lesser known, more local apps too—like Naver—in South Korea.

We almost never use Airbnb anymore, unless we have a larger group that is ok with doing the laundry, fixing some leaky pipes, and scooping the host’s cat’s litter once we leave - oh and paying $100 in cleaning fees and service charges, in addition to that.

The best deals we’ve found on hotels lately have been through Google’s hotel search feature, which searches not only the big sites, but also directly on the hotel’s website as well as local booking agencies. It’s been a lifesaver for us recently. Just check out the prices for this hotel in Nagasaki we’ve been looking at.

Hotels.google.com if you’ve never tried it. It’s a bit clunky,

but once you figure it out, it’s golden.

Next - flexibility is huge. Wherever you can be flexible—whether it’s avoiding travel on a weekend, flying into a smaller city, or taking different forms of public transportation—try to—it’s an awesome way to travel and money saving, as well.

On this most recent trip to Japan, a flight into Tokyo for us would’ve been just under $1000 per person, one way. We saw that and thought immediately that this whole trip was just not going to happen. Then we started looking into other cities in Japan, and found a one way flight to Fukuoka for just $220 per person. We switched our trip around to end in Tokyo instead of start in it, and saved ourselves $1600 as a result.

We’ve taken this time as a chance to go and visit many of the smaller-and-awesome destinations. Honestly, it’s a nice change for us.

Save money on flights, then spend all that money you saved on ramen.

Fukuoka’s TeamLabs was AWESOME

And now, the final and most important tip — be kind, be patient, and remember, everyone’s had a rough go of it these last few years.

We’re on the ground trying to figure out some of these money saving problems right now. But the closest we’ve come to an answer has been to just embrace it for what it is - every single big tourist destination is taking advantage of the rebound in travel and people in the hospitality and travel industries are working harder now more than ever.

That’s it for today!

If you have any tips or tricks that you’ve been using to cut costs and still travel these days, just respond to this email and then we can all help each other travel more!

Today

Wrapping up editing on our Taipei video (we’re so proud of this one and can’t wait for you to see it!), then flying back to Japan for more filming.

The (Near) Future

Making more helpful, useful, meme-filled, budget travel videos everywhere we can.

Our Latest Videos

The second of our series—3 Days in Taipei! (Ok…more like 3.75 days.) This one was a special one for us. Still dreaming of the food.

The first of our series—3 Days in Mexico City! We had a blast.

See you next week…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs 3 years ago, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles.

It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

Unsubscribe