How To Get To Australia for $150

It may seem impossible or even absurd but I did in fact manage to get to the other side of the world for only $150. It wasn't even all that hard and something that pretty much anyone can manage to do. It just requires a bit of patience, research, and the right timing.

My first absurdly inexpensive ticket was to Japan, round-trip in business class. I had scrimped and saved every last point that I had to get there. In the end the ticket cost me 100,000 American Airlines AAdvantage points and $32 (plus 3 years of the then $60 annual fee, making the grand total $212). I got the idea to do it when I started travelling with work. The preferred carrier of my employer was American and so it in turn became my preferred carrier. Any trip that I took where it was financially feasible, which meant within $50 of the lowest price available, I flew American. Then the next step was getting the AAdvantage credit card which boosted me another 50,000 points. It took about three years of normal spending, travel with work, and the sign-on bonus to get 130,000 points, more then enough to get me to Tokyo on the skint. It was worth every penny and certainly worth the wait to go that far in luxury.

Recently I had an opportunity to do it again. Like most professionals my age I signed up for and received the Chase Sapphire Reserve in early 2017 while they were running the 100,000 point sign-on bonus. That bonus was short lived but nearly everyone I know got it. I even wrote about my initial thoughts upon getting the card and exploring it's benefits a bit more. Initially I was disappointed by the power of the points. For 100k points I know I can get across the planet to the Asia on American Airlines but the points only transferred to airlines that I rarely fly (or in the case of British Airways only use for domestic reward flights). Unsure if I was going to keep the card another year I thought that it was best to use the points for a trip that I wouldn't normally buy myself and couldn't otherwise get to using any of my other point programs.

Booking the ticket through the Chase reward portal was kind of a nightmare. The information was hard to read and it wasn't easy to see what airlines were available overall. In the end I felt so fatigued by the experience on their site that I simply booked the cheapest ticket that was listed that didn't' have an outrageous number of super long layovers.

About 90k points and $200 (after the yearly fee) got me the following itinerary:

• New York to Melbourne, Australia (through Guangzhou China)
• Melbourne, Australia to Sydney, Australia
• Auckland, New Zealand to Taipei, Taiwan (through Guangzhou China)
• Taipei, Taiwan to New York (through Guangzhou China)

And paid cold hard cash ($243) for:

• Sydney, Australia to Auckland, New Zealand

Making the total cost for flights for my 19 day adventure through Oceania roughly $443. Not too bad if I don't say so myself.