“I’ve always been a traveler,” Gilbert Ott tells me as we begin our conversation. The Conde Nast Travel writer and creator of the website God Save the Points attributes his present career to a Delta napkin embossed with a plug for a points program. Seeing it at the time, he thought, “Wow. That’s something I should know.” He was eleven.
Traveling extensively for tennis in his youth and as a professional in the music industry, Ott learned the ins and outs of air travel. He also learned how to get killer deals. Now, he travels over 150,000 miles a year, or four times around the world — always as inexpensively as possible with maximum upgrades.
As we approach peak holiday travel, Ott made time to talk with us about his site, cheap flights 101, and inexpensive destinations. The basics you learn in this post are a good foundation to build on. You’ll be one step closer to making your dream trip a reality.
What was the impetus to start the website?
It’s actually a nice thing. My wife is a tennis player, and when we first met she was living in New York, working in New York. She decided she was over that and moved back to the UK before we had been dating for long. We decided that we liked each other. I’d go see her in the UK, and we obviously hit it off. We’re married now. But, for that year, we did long distance, so I was flying to London as much as I could, burning through pretty much all of my savings at that time. She was doing the same thing. This was all in economy. Deals really mattered; when we traveled really mattered. And when you’re trying to go every month, you really see the various pricing differentials, and you start to pick up on ways to save.
That was the impetus. That was like, “Oh, shit. This is my potential future here, and I have a very strict budget of whatever is in my savings account, and I would like to be able to keep doing this as long as I need to.” At the end of the year, I think she said to me — I will not verify this —”You should just write about this stuff so other people can benefit.” She seemed to think that I knew more than any of the people at the airline we’d be on the phone with or dealing with. So, that sounded like a good idea.
Do you have a loyal fan base?
We have a couple million people that read the site now, so we’re very lucky to have built a hopefully still growing fan base. They’re really cool for the most part. We get lots of trolls and stuff like that too. Not everybody is friendly.
That seems like the weirdest website ever to be like, “I’m going to go troll at the flight savings website.”
It’s so funny because you have these things that people think are secrets, but none of this stuff is secret. It’s just whether people know it or not. If there’s an amazing way to use points to go to Australia first class or something, it’s not secret. It’s published on a website that millions of people are going to every year, and not even mine. Millions and millions of people read an airline website. The goal of the site is to try to spell it out. We give the takeaway, the read between the lines bits and say, “This is how you do this,” and walk you through every step. People will troll the shit out of that. They’ll be like, “You bastard. You’re ruining this. Once your people get a hold of this … ” So we get lots of that.
But I can officially say for the record that I do not give two shits about any of those people.
Well, of course you don’t. You’re single-handedly responsible for killing travel, so of course you don’t care.
[laughing] I’m just the Judas of travel.
What are a few things that the average person can do to get really good deals? You said none of them are secret, but there have to be a few consistent things you should be doing always to be getting deals.
Absolutely. The main thing is that proactive thought is so key. By proactive thought I mean figure out where you want to go, figure out how much it usually costs so that you know that you’re getting a deal when you see a price pop up. There was a deal that was $340 from Seattle to London or Paris roundtrip. It was an amazing deal. I know that’s an amazing deal. I think most people would think that’s an amazing deal, but if you haven’t been following prices, you don’t quite know. I know that during those months tickets are often $700, $800. That’s basically half price or better. But if somebody says, “Oh, a deal is $700.” Then, that’s not a great deal.
One important distinction is that airlines love to say “sale”. It rarely actually means sale. They’re always on sale. I think every airline has a sale on 365 days a year. There are probably 15 days a year where there’s actually prices you want to listen to them for. The takeaway is that most of the best sales are not officially announced. That’s where sites like mine, other sites like Secret Flying, or the Flight Deal come in. We plug those gaps of the unannounced sales.
The main point I’m getting to in a very long-winded way, which I apologize, is that price trackers are the best single thing. Once you’ve established that you know what a ticket could cost or should cost, set price trackers. They’re free, they’re easy, and they’re life-changers.
So, price trackers essentially are like Google alerts for prices?
Exactly. Google flights offers them. Hopper offers them. Kayak offers them. Google flights I love because you can set up to five cities at once. I know you’re in Portland, right?
Yeah.
Let’s say your next holiday you’re like, “Oh, I could go to LA. I’d love to go to Bali. I’d love to go to London. I’d love to go to Rome or Rio de Janeiro.” Logic would say that Los Angeles is going to be the best deal, but with the price tracker, you can be really surprised. It can turn out that Bali, for whatever reason, is much cheaper to go to when you want to go than Los Angeles.
Oh, cool.
And that’s real. There was a deal to Bali a couple of weeks ago that was $300 from New York. I think there was one this last week or two that was $400 for the west coast. Sometimes, you get these pretty amazing things that pop up. For the most part, the way people like me find out about them or know about them is just by having alerts set for so many places for so many dates.
If you know when your holiday or break times are going to be, set those price alerts early so you can track them and get a feel for what’s going on. Occasionally, they will absolutely shock you when something really cool comes along.
Sweet! So that’s getting you your cheap flight.
That’s cheap flights 101. One side tip is don’t be afraid to set price alerts for business or first-class, especially in the US where they often sell them during sales for only like $30 or $40 more than economy. Obviously, the seats aren’t that cool with most US flights, but the benefits like free drinks and check bags and the priority security and all of that really add up. It can totally be worth the $30 or whatever you pay if it’s a good deal.
You get upgrades like crazy. How do you manage that?
Kind of. I try to balance it all. I took a $69 Norwegian deal from the kind of faraway New York airport to Dublin. That was, like, full grinder economy, no check bag, all of that kind of stuff. It was a great experience for the money. But, if it’s a flight over three to five hours, I try to always fly business. A lot of that comes from collecting points. There are lots of interesting ways to collect points without getting a credit card, with getting a credit card, without even flying, and also through mistakes. That’s kind of the sexy topic du jour.
Yes, very sexy.
They’re crazy though. Recently, I booked a flight from Vancouver to Sydney, a roundtrip business class one, for $700 — like flat beds and everything. The deal lasted three hours, and then it was gone. That’s the value of what we’re trying to do, stay on top of things. If you have price trackers set, there’s a fair chance you would have been alerted in time.
Do you ever fly to a city because the deal flying out of that city is so good?
100 percent, if you’re on the ball. For example, a few weeks ago, I was flying from London. There were no deals from London. They were expensive as hell in every cabin. But, if I was willing to take a $29 Ryanair flight to Dublin, then the deals were 1/3 of the price.
It’s the same often with a lot of US markets. Portland might never see a great deal, whereas Seattle, which you could bus, drive, fly, whatever to will have often deals at a fraction of the price because they get a lot of the Asian market.
A key within that tip is to try to look from hub cities. So, if you’re in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, try to look at Philly. The mechanism behind that is that airlines attack each other all the time. Let’s take Seattle; it has been a very Alaska Airlines/Delta Airlines city. American and other carriers will occasionally say, “Let’s attack them on their home ground.” And they’ll offer ridiculously cheap prices and then they kind of fight it out from there.
That’s awesome! Do you have your one or two amazing savings or points accomplishments, like, something that people don’t believe you were able to wrangle?
The one people still talk about is we managed to take a free private jet because the company was dumb enough to put out promo codes that didn’t require becoming a member. I think they were intended for people who paid for this fractional jet ownership, and then, they’d have a credit once they joined. But, they didn’t actually require you to join or pay any money, so we were able to redeem our credits for a completely free, really cool private jet ride from Boston to Washington D.C., and it felt very, very cool.
That was a good one. That was very cool. What else? I flew Emirates first-class, which has the showers and the closable doors, and they served Dom Perignon 2006, which is $150 a bottle. I flew that for signing up for a checking account.
What?
It was a short flight. It was just from Bangkok to Hong Kong, so it was just over three hours, but Citi would give you 50,000 points at a time if you just opened a Citi Gold checking account or savings account. There was no minimum deposit, so I put $10 in. I think I had to pay a monthly fee, but then, I had enough points to cover the flight between the two. I probably got at least $300 worth of champagne, not including the seat, and the flight, and all of that good stuff.
Yeah, I bet. Although it’s sort of a bummer to be on a flight that nice for only a couple of hours, because it might seem weird if you decided to shower, but there’s a shower.
Oh, I did. I wasn’t missing out on that. For the record. If you’re going to do one of those things, it’s a when-in-Rome experience. You have to do it all, even if it doesn’t make logical sense. Yeah, I didn’t want to leave. I was more excited about that than getting to Hong Kong.
What are some fabulous but inexpensive places to travel? Like, it’s great to get a deal on the flight, but if you end up going poor once you’re there…
Great question. Southeast Asia is very hard to pass up. You can live for a fraction of what you would in the states. Even though the tickets may be $50 or $100 more expensive than you were planning, you can save a fortune while you’re there. Colombia is great. You can do the whole Narcos thing and feel like a champ. But, Colombia is very affordable. The accommodations are very affordable, the food’s very affordable, and beers are cheap. There’s not much not to like about that.
Even more local is Vancouver. It’s an awesome city and because of the Canadian Dollar, things are a bit cheaper there now, though not as drastic as what you’d find in somewhere like Bangkok or Vietnam or something of that sort.
The amazing things to me are these crazy flight deals you can get to places where life is really cheap. We were in Bali a few months ago and there was literally a deal a couple of weeks ago that was $300 roundtrip for most US cities. There are quite often deals around $400 roundtrip to Bali. Massages there are $8 an hour, and when we went, we had a chef that was cooking for us at a villa for $50 a day. They cooked for up to four people for that price. I mean, this is like cooking, ingredients, cleaning, serving, the whole thing. It was wild. I’ve just never experienced anything like that.
I think if people do want to travel for less, sometimes it’s better to go further and tap into those markets that really appreciate the US Dollar. These are places where the US Dollar or northern European currency goes super far.
What are your upcoming travels? Where are you going?
Oh my goodness. We’ve got a lot coming up. We’re flying to London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Kyoto, back to London, then New York, LA, San Francisco, Vancouver, Tokyo again, Sydney, Melbourne, Queenstown, Auckland, Los Angeles again, then Mumbai, Deli, Zurich, and then I’ll probably relax for a little bit.
Fuck. You’re living, man. You’re living.
