Sure your tour is about playing some rock n roll (or country, or bluegrass, or jazz, or death metal) and sure it’s about selling your CDs and other merch, and making new fans across the country, and maybe even the entire world, but it’s also about making the best business sense, if you’re even remotely serious about music, and even if you’re not, the truth is that your band is a business and you want it to make money, touring can be expensive, and if you want to come home having made more money than you lost, or at least losing less money than you could, there’s one way to do that, and that’s to travel hack the heck out of your tour!
What’s Travel Hacking All About?
The objective of travel hacking is to get the best travel option for the lowest price or best deal, or even better at no charge at all. This is achieved through leveraging things like air miles, hotel rewards points and more as well as doing research online using cheap flight/ hotel search engines and various other tips and tricks that involve great savings – or spending no money at all. And since touring is all about travel, the lower your travel costs are, the more you’ll gain from your tour.
Air Miles and Cheap Flight Finding
Flights can be an expensive thing, often the most expensive part of a trip is the air tickets – particularly if you are going offshore to tour in another country –Europe, England, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, none of these are cheap destinations, and even flying within the US – whether you’re flying in a band member or crew, tour manager or all of the above – can also get a little on the pricey side.
But, it doesn’t have to.
One important thing you can do to start taking advantage of the fact you’re travelling so much is to begin collecting air miles which can later be used to get free flights and various other benefits such as priority check ins, free baggage checking, and seat upgrades.
To do this, you want to join multiple airlines’ frequent flyer programs – infamous travel hacker Chris Guillbeau recommends on his sites to join at least one of the three alliances which are One World, Star Alliance and Sky Team because points from one airline can often be used to get free flights on other airlines in the same alliance. So for example if you fly US airways a lot in the states, they are part of the Star Alliance, and you could use your points to get a flight to another country, say, New Zealand, on another airline on the Star Alliance – such as Air New Zealand.
You must remember to always use your frequent flyer member number when booking flights to be sure you get the miles – and a lot of programs allow you to gift or share miles, meaning that if one band member can’t afford his or her ticket, the other members may possibly be able to pool their points together to purchase it if they are all on the same frequent flyer program. So make sure that everyone in the band signs up for air miles points with multiple providers any time they travel on a plane for your band’s purposes or for their own purposes, because so long as there is no sign up fee, it can only be beneficial.
You can also sign up for airline credit cards or bank credit cards/debit cards that give you points towards various air miles programs or hotel/ dining etc rewards, but you generally need to have good credit to do this, and to be prepared to accept the responsibility of shouldering the debt, possibly for your entire band. You may possibly be able to get a business credit card with the same type of benefits depending on how your band is set up or if you have management they may have one or consider setting one up for this purpose.
Outside of simply collecting and redeeming air miles for free flights, there are also many ways to find the cheapest possible flights out there using various websites such as Kayak, orbitz and priceline. You want to keep an eye out for smaller, regional airlines as sometimes they can be cheaper than the bigger national or international companies. Search several different flight-finding travel engines, as not all search engines get every airline. Keep an eye on airline websites, sometimes it’s cheaper to book directly with an airline but you want to check flight search engines first just in case it’s not. There are also sometimes what are known as ‘glitch fares’ which are flights which are incredibly cheap that are mistakes or glitches and the price for them goes up later but if you can get in straight away you get a cheap, cheap flight. If you are planning on booking flights any time soon you will definitely want to keep an eye out for glitch fares, promotions and the main flight search engines so you can snap up something super cheap as soon as you see it.
There are many other flight-related travel hacks that can be done that aren’t fully discussed here, see some of the travel hacking resources below for more advanced info on this.
What if my band doesn’t fly anywhere?! What if we just go on van tours?
That’s no problem, you can still use all the above tips to your advantage for your own personal or business travel goals, and even though you think at this stage that you don’t need to worry about air travel for your band, at some point in your band’s career you probably will so it’s always a good idea to be ahead of the game and get started early. However parts II & III of How to Travel Hack a Tour cover utilising gas cards, rental cars/ vans/ buses and other forms of transportation, finding cheap or free accommodation and various tips and tricks that may be more relevant to your situation whether you travel by air much or not.
Stay tuned for Parts II & III covering hotels and other accomodation, gas cards, dining, route planning to save cash and other rewards, tips and tricks!
Further Travel Hacking Resources:
- Man vs Debt: Travel Hacking for Noobs
- Nomadic Matt: The Ultimate Travel Hacking Guide
- Chris Guillebeau’s The Art of Non-Conformity: Beginner’s Guide to Travel Hacking
- Chris Guillebeau: Travel Hacking Cartel*
**(Note: the Travel Hacking Cartel is a paid membership site but you can get a 14 day trial for $1 that will give you a LOT of info if you are interested in travel hacking, consider it a graduation from the Art of Non Conformity’s Beginner’s Guide)
