How We Scored 5 Free International Flights

We are heading to Costa Rica in a few weeks. A previous post highlighted the emotional pull to traveling internationally, but there is a pretty practical reason also as to why we chose Costa Rica itself.

The flights were free.

(Well mostly free anyways, minus some minimal airport and government fees.)

Here's how we scored FIVE FREE ROUNDTRIP INTERNATIONAL FLIGHTS:

I had heard of Southwest Airlines' Companion Pass but it always seemed so out of reach, but then we discovered some quick hacks that allowed us to tap into it. The Companion Pass allows somebody else to fly for FREE with any flights that you purchase. Once you earn it, it's good for the rest of the year that you earn it, AND the entire following calendar year.

To earn it, you need 125,000 of their frequent flyer points (Rapid Rewards), and you need to earn them in one year. That's a lot of flights if you're just earning the Rapid Rewards points through flying. You can also earn points through credit card purchases too, and you can earn A LOT of those points through the sign-on bonuses for signing up for a new card.

When I signed up, I earned 40,000 points for opening a personal credit card and 80,000 points for opening a business credit card.

That's 120,000 of the 125,000. The rest of the points came through the purchases necessary to earn the sign-on bonuses.

I signed up for both cards in November, and then timed the cards so that the points were earned in January. Remember that once you earn the Companion Pass, it's good for the rest of the calendar year AND the next year. So by earning Companion Pass in January, we have almost TWO years of BOGOs for flights.

That's one of the five free tickets.

Because we had then earned 125,000 points, we then used those points to purchase the other four flights. We had some points in our account already, but 125,000 covered most of what we needed.

Click here to sign up for a Southwest Credit Card and start earning points to your Companion Pass. Use the referral link, so we can get some more points too. :) 

Once we had emotionally bought into traveling internationally and had worked out the logistics of scoring 5 free tix via Southwest, it was then the question of "Okay, where does Southwest fly internationally?"

Here's what we found:

After a few Google searches of the above destinations and then just a general intrigue, we landed on Costa Rica. 

Hope this helps you with one of the many logistics of traveling with your family!

14 Years in the Making

 

Some dreams take 14 years to become reality...

After graduating from college, my wife Sara and I spent a year living in South Korea. We hiked its mountains and rode a cherry red scooter around its beautiful islands. We taught English during the week and then jumped on its spotless subway trains to new magical destinations around Seoul. When we weren't exploring, we were resting in Buddhist temples and relaxing jimjilbangs. 

We fell in love with traveling. The culture. The food. The languages. The differences of people halfway around the world. And their similarities.

We came alive so much while traveling, that we decided to orient our lives around careers that would allow us to travel with our future kids. Plans were laid, and we were ready to create a life that allowed us to travel the world.

That was 2009.

We arrived back to the United States to a stock market collapse that made job prospects of any kind hard to come by, let alone jobs that would create the flexibility that we were hoping to create. I stopped counting when I had submitted my 150th job application. 

I finally landed a teaching position, and we were well on our way to carving out some time during my teaching breaks to travel. The first McD Baby was in the oven, and we were ready.

And then that sweet baby girl was born with some major health issues. Frivolous things like traveling and seeing the world were replaced by bigger things like surviving. Feeding tubes and blinking lights and soaps that smelled like alcohol and misdiagnoses and specialists (so many specialists).

We didn't even realize that a dream had died.

It wasn't even close to being on our list of important things anymore.

Everybody's survival became our top and only goal for the next several years. 

(If you're just trying to survive right now, we've been there.)

But then Life slowly (very slowly) started coming together a little here and there. McD Baby #2 arrived and all signs pointed towards a hopeful future for our fam.

Some friends even invited us on a big trip. "Hey, we should all go to Ireland together," they said. Initially, we thought it was out of the question due to the many health concerns that were still present for our Lainey. The more and more we processed it though, the more we felt like giving it a shot. If we were ever going to try and do something like this, it made sense to us to try it with friends who could help with the journey.

"Ok, we're in!" we told them with much excitement.

...

Except we had misunderstood what "all" meant to our friends. They had just meant Sara and me.
As in, no kids allowed.

"Oh.

Um.

Ok, got it."

We didn't go to Ireland that year.

But we DID rekindle the fires of a dream that had been dormant for years. With careful meticulous planning, we realized that we really could do this travel thing with our kids. Some of the extra planning would require more money and some of it would necessitate just a longer time to think through logistics.

Our Lainey is on the Autism Spectrum. Of the many different ways that she sees the world, routine and familiarity are important to her. We realized this meant that we couldn't travel fast. We couldn't hop from AirBnB to AirBnB every night and cram as much into a vacation as possible. We'd need to find a way to travel to a central base of sorts and do day trips from that base.

She also has epilepsy. After hundreds (thousands?) of seizures, we finally thankfully have them under control. That could change any day, but we will hopefully hit 3 years of no seizures this year!
Travel exhaustion could easily be a seizure trigger for her, so we'd need to travel slower.

Both of those things led us to realize that we needed time. We needed time to travel slow.

So a couple of years ago, we went on an experimental trip of sorts domestically. We set off for 3 weeks to Florida and LOVED every second of it.

"Alright baby, we can do this," I say to my wife. "I KNOW!" she says back.

We got home from that trip and then a day later started thinking and planning about our first international trip as a family. A year and half later, here we are about to embark on another experimental trip of sorts.

A year and a half of saving money and spending nights investigating where we would land.

Ok, that was a really long way to say that...

For the month of March 2023, my family will be exploring the beaches and volcanoes of Costa Rica!

The whole month! All five of us!

Me + Sara + Lainey + Owen + Chloe.
(And quite a few visitors throughout the month, also!)

It's been a journey to get here.
The McD Journey.

Some dreams just take 14 years to become reality.