This Guy Has Gamed the Airline Industry so He Never Has to Pay for a Flight Emma Woollacott - AOL
go to original April 9, 2015

Scott Keyes will be traveling to 13 countries and over 20,000 miles on his next trip, all for free. (Scott Keyes)

Scott Keyes, a writer for Think Progress, has become an expert on gaming credit card airmiles offers and frequent flyer schemes. And he's now set up a 20,000-mile trip taking in 13 countries, with all his flights and hotels already covered.

To stack up the points, Keyes has 25 credit cards. He then researches thoroughly the best ways to use them, picking the flights and hotels that need the least number of points. This next trip, he says, took 10 to 15 hours to plan.

"It's not necessarily easy or intuitive for beginners," he told Business Insider. "But the good news is that because if you do a little bit of leg work - learn how to get a few miles and how to use them well - you can start to travel really, really well."

In the past, Keyes has flown from New York to Milan for $65, visited the Galapagos Islands for $45, and travelled to Belgium for under $150. He's visited 30 countries, flying 354,000 miles in the process - the equivalent of more than 14 times round the earth.

But for this trip, he's paying almost nothing to take in Mexico, Nicaragua, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Grenada, Germany, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Lithuania and Finland. All it will cost him is a few airport taxes, each under $20.

After Keyes' friends kept asking him how he did it, he wrote two ebooks: How To Fly For Free and How To Find Cheap Flights. They explain everything from how to get yourself bumped from a flight - and compensated - to how to find mistake fares.

Read the rest at AOL

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