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My name is Josh Rascheitz. I am your host. Today I want to share with you some very tactical, practical tips and tools that I have found useful in planning my global travels. I want to share with you how I plan and how I book travels for our family of four.

Now, ideally, at some point in the future, I will book my travels very differently. Ideally, at some point in the future, I'll pick up the phone and I'll call the, who knows, I don't know, the Amex Centurion concierge. And I'll say, I want to go to here. Can you please set up the trip for me?

And they'll set up the trip for me and they'll send me the details and I'll show up. But I have not yet reached that particular style of travel. I still book my travels myself. And so I want to share with you how I do it and in hopes that these will be some useful tools for you.

We genuinely do live, as I see it, in a golden age of travel. I've said this many times, I'm going to continue to say we live in a golden age of travel. You, like me, you might reminisce about the time that you could go to the airport gate and greet your loved ones as they came down the jetway.

I miss those days. You might reminisce about the times that you could travel without going through, you know, crazy security lines and watching your loved ones be groped by the men and women in blue. I miss those days as well. But unfortunately, we don't live in that world. But there are some other compensations.

There are some things that I appreciate. And the biggest thing that I appreciate about the world that we live in at the moment is that travel has become very democratized. It has become very, very cheap. It's not always cheap. There are exceptions, but travel is cheaper now than it's ever been at any point in history.

And I don't care what style of travel, whether you want to go on an airplane or a boat. I'm I am convinced it is cheaper now than it has ever been at any point in history. Normal people, right? Not just the rich. Normal people can today go out and see the world.

And the way I'm going to tell you to to look into this is going to help you do that a little bit more effectively. Now, the Web and the applications built on the Web are the major tools that are impacting our ability to travel so effectively. And so the first thing that you need is a good Web connection.

Now, I'm going to suggest to you that you use a cell phone as your primary base of operations. You can do much of what I'm about to say on the computer, but we've reached a point where a lot of times you do get some advantages over a computer using a phone.

You get notifications, you get sales, you get alerts, you get in some cases some improved functionality using an app. And so grab yourself a good cell phone, a good cell phone that's going to have enough memory that you can install the apps that you want and that you can use effectively.

I suggest to you also that if you're going to travel internationally, that you go ahead and get yourself a phone plan that will work seamlessly all around the world. This is where, although I have been at many times in my life, a major advocate of prepaid cell phone plans.

This is where prepaid cell phone plans break down. Prepaid cell phone plans do not work well for international travelers. Now you say, Joshua, but look, if I go abroad, I can get a local chip. I can get a local SIM card. And the answer is yes, you may be able to do that.

But still, you are going to want, if you're going to engage in significant international travel, you're going to want a phone that works seamlessly. From the United States, there are two really good options. The first option is T-Mobile. T-Mobile has a really good international plan that allows you to basically, I think their starting point plan is 60 bucks a month.

And that comes included with international travel. You can have unlimited texting around the world, unlimited data, although it's going to be throttled at 2G speeds unless you pay for an extra $15 a month or so for one of their high speed data packs. So data, unlimited data, no data caps anywhere in the world.

And if you want to talk on the phone, then you will be able to talk on the phone and you'll just simply be billed 25 cents a minute. That is an excellent plan. The second excellent plan would be Google Fi. So if you have an Android device, although Google Fi will work on iPhones, an Android device will be a little bit more seamless and I would recommend you look into Google Fi.

Google Fi also offers good international plans. If you're with other major postpaid carriers, such as AT&T or Verizon, they each also have their own international packs. And if you're not a frequent traveler, you don't need a phone, just allows you to go wherever you want to go. You can just add one of their packs on when you travel.

But you will want to have a phone because that $30 or $50 that you spend on international data will get you the best deals wherever you happen to go around the world. So let's begin with how to get there. Most of the time getting there is going to involve an airplane flight.

Obviously, there are alternatives. Sometimes you may want to look into buses. Sometimes you may want to look into boats. Those are a little bit niche. Buses are not so niche, right? You can find that if you're going from one country to another, check into the bus lines if you want to ride a bus.

But usually, of course, airlines are going to be the foundation. If you're in a place where train travel is common, start with Google Maps. Google Maps may be your best solution to start figuring out the local train routes, etc. But let's begin with airplanes. I have a few preferred applications that really work well for me.

And these change from time to time, but there are some constants. If I had to only pick three, I would pick these three applications. The first application is a free application that you can use on the computer called flightconnections.com. Now, Flight Connections is not a booking app. What Flight Connections does is show you what airlines fly from one airport to another airport.

And so I use Flight Connections. I pay for the premium account. It's, I don't know, $15 a year or something like that. And that allows me to use it with no ads on the computer. The on-the-computer version works seamlessly. You just watch a quick five-second ad and you're in.

But the premium version gives you no ads on the computer. And it also gives you full functionality on the mobile app. So I usually use the mobile app. I also like just to pay to get rid of ads. I work very hard to keep my life free of advertisements most of the time, unless they're targeted to me.

But generalized advertisements I try to get rid of. So I pay for the premium version. And it's phenomenal. And so this is usually my first step. Is I look and I say, "I'm located here." And you put in the airport that's closest to where you are. And what Flight Connections will do is it will show you what direct flights go from where you are to another place in the world.

So let's pretend that you are sitting in Miami, Florida. You go to Flight Connections and you put in MIA for the Miami International Airport. And it will show you where in the world you can fly with a single direct flight. You can add, of course, indirect flights. But I use this for single direct flights.

Then using that tool, it'll show you all of the airlines that run that route. So let's say you have Miami to Panama City. Well, of course, there are going to be a number of airlines that run direct from Miami International to Panama City. And so you can say, "Oh, look.

Spirit does this. Copa does this. American Airlines does this." So here are all of my options. And that gives you a chance to understand what airlines service that route. The reason this is important is you can use this tool to show airlines that won't come up in airline aggregators sometimes.

So, for example, I recently flew on Volaris from Cancun to San Jose, Costa Rica. I'm pretty sure that that flight did not emerge for me from a kayak search. Rather, that flight emerged for me by finding out, "Oh, look. There is an airline that is running a direct flight from Cancun to San Jose, Costa Rica.

Let me go and check their website." And you'll find this is very useful to find those direct flights, especially from the budget airlines that you may not find in an aggregator. So that's why I start here. Because we're traveling with four children, I strongly prefer a direct flight when possible and I'm willing to pay extra for it.

So I like to know what the options are. And this is the best way that I know of. As far as I understand it, this application pulls the data from the airlines that have the licenses to go from one place to the next. And so I believe it's a fairly comprehensive application that allows you to look at all of the different options that are available to you.

So I would strongly encourage to you the use of FlightConnections.com and the Flight Connections mobile app. Now, one of the functions that Flight Connections has is basically a price chart. You can turn on a pricing view and it will show you all of the... it'll show you the range.

It'll have green dots for cheaper places, yellow dots for medium expensive places, and red dots for expensive places. And this is exceedingly value because the secret to budget travel is to figure out where it's cheap to go and then find out what you might want to do there. Rather than deciding where you want to go and then trying to figure out how to get there.

When you decide that you want to go to a certain place, for example, I'm living in Miami and I want to go to Italy for two weeks during August. Okay, that's fine. And of course, that's how most normal people live their life and select their travels. But now you have a very narrow window of opportunities and you're going to be stuck with whatever airlines are available to you, whatever flights are available to you on those fixed dates.

If you have the money and you want to go to a specific place, by all means, go for it. And these tools will still be useful to you. But the best way for you to be able to afford to travel the world a little bit less expensively is if you make a point of going where you can travel less expensively.

And to do that, you want to look at where you can go inexpensively based on where you are. Most places in the world can access other regional options inexpensively. So it's your cross-ocean flights, your cross-continental flights. Those are often more expensive. But if you'll travel based upon where you can get from one place to another inexpensively and then fill in the details from there, things will go well for you.

So if your goal is to see the world, remember, first decide where it's cheap or reasonable for you to go and then figure out what's interesting to do when you get there. Don't start with, I want to go here. So flight connections and their pricing map is a very useful tool.

The second tool that I will use is the web or sorry, the flight aggregator kayak. There are lots and lots of flight aggregators. There are people who are far nerdier than I am about using all of the tools. Some people like Skyscanner. Some people like Google Flights. I have frequently used STA matrix and sorry, ITA matrix in the past.

To good effect. I have used a lot of these tools. But I have found that my favorites are flight connections, kayak, and then we'll cover Kiwi in a moment. Now, kayak is a fabulous search tool with really good options to figure out how to get from where you are to where you want to be.

And kayak is very useful to give you all the options, including some weird, you know, cobbled together affairs. So if you want to go from city A to city B, kayak will often give you a fair where you go from city A to city M, then the city R and then back to city B.

But it's $47. And so those are really nice to know about. Kayak also has really good filtering tools. So you can search based upon the fact of, yeah, I don't want any more than one connection or I want these particular airlines. That's useful. Kayak also lets you look at fair calendars to get an idea of where you can go.

Sorry, when is the cheapest time to go from here to there? And kayak has a tool called kayak explore. So I also really like this one. If you go to kayak.com/explore and you put in your airport that you want to start from, then you can choose a couple of other sliders.

You can say how long you want to go for, what month you want to travel in, and you can see prices all around the world of where you can go during those time periods for a round trip ticket. And often this will present to you some really phenomenal fares, and it gives you a sense of how to get to certain regions at certain times.

I don't have much more to say about kayak other than the fact that it's a really good tool. They also allow you to set a price alert. So if you register for an account, you can put a price alert and you can save your searches. So I want to fly from Miami International to Buenos Aires.

So I'm going to save the search and they'll give you a predictor tool that'll tell you when you want to go there, when you don't want to go there, etc. If I had to pick one app to do everything with based upon my experience, and again, I've tried some of the ones that are more popular and kind of the travel hacking community.

Some people love Google flights. I have extensively used ITA Matrix. But the one app that I would choose is kayak. If I had to only choose one kayak will frequently flip you over to other search aggregators. And the third app that I find exceedingly useful is an app called Kiwi.

Kiwi.com. K I W I dot com. Why is Kiwi so useful to me? A few reasons, but what I love Kiwi for is one way fares. We live in a world where most airlines charge you vastly more to buy a one way ticket than they do for a round trip itinerary.

And I have struggled over the years to figure out how to overcome this. How do I get a just a cheap quote on a one way ticket? Now, thankfully, the budget airlines all around the world are breaking the you know, this this tradition. If you go to JetBlue.com and you search for a one way fare, you get the same exact price on a one way fare as you do for the pricing on the first leg of a round trip fare.

And so the budget airlines are influencing the business. And I find myself increasingly able to get decent quotes on simple one way fares, even for some of the legacy brands. But Kiwi.com always gives me great deals on one way fares, and they will also use skip lag searches to get me those.

So they do three important things for me personally with my style of travel. Number one, I like to travel one way at the moment because we're living nomadically. It doesn't really matter to me if I can get from place A to place B. I can figure out what place C is once I'm there, but I don't want to go from A to B and then back to A.

I'd rather go to B and I'm willing to pay a little bit more for the flexibility as well. So I don't mind a little bit more on a one way fare, but I don't want to have a ticket sitting out there that's going to take me back, especially when I'm not going to use the return trip.

Certainly, there are many times where you're better off to to to buy a ticket and just not use the return flight. I've done that routinely, and it stinks when you do it, but sometimes you find a good enough fare that you can do it. But by using Kiwi, I always start with a one way search.

So I go to Kiwi.com, I do a one way search, and I look at their date calendar. So they have in their search function, when you put in your departure airport and your arrival airport, it immediately pulls up a calendar of fares. And that calendar of fares shows you the seasonal price of your ticket.

It'll show you, hey, Tuesday, three weeks from now, there's a really cheap ticket. So you can click on that and you can take a look and see what's available Tuesday, three weeks from now. That is very, very valuable. The next thing that is valuable about Kiwi is they allow you to search by region.

So let's say that I am in Florida. I can search, let me use a better example, right at the moment I'm in Malta. So I was planning to go from Malta back to Western Europe, and I'm still planning to do that tentatively. But the question is, well, where in Western Europe?

It doesn't matter all that much to me where I wind up. And so using Kiwi, I can say I want to go from Malta to Western Europe. Or most likely I'm probably going to fly back to Portugal. So I'm going to say from Malta to Portugal and I can search an entire country so I can search a region.

I can search Western Europe or South America, and then I can search an entire country, which is even narrower. Or sometimes you can search a region. This is helpful because it allows you to find deals. So, for example, I was doing this search recently from Malta back to Portugal.

And so I discovered that I can fly from Lisbon. Sorry, I can fly from Malta into Porto for about 18 euros instead of flying into Lisbon for about 90 euros. And so if it really doesn't matter, I mean, Porto and Lisbon are two and a half hours apart from each other.

Then I can take the cheaper flight and I wouldn't have found it if I weren't searching from Malta to Portugal using Kiwi.com. That's the first thing that I really appreciate about Kiwi. Well, the calendar was the first thing. The second thing is the ability to search by region. The third thing is that Kiwi will give me skip lag fares.

So it'll show me a ticket. Let's say I wanted to fly from Malta to Portugal, but this doesn't work for this routing. But let's say that it finds out there's a route that actually goes from Malta to Portugal and then on to Paris. But if I buy the ticket from Malta to Paris, it'll show me the fare and I can get off the airplane in Portugal and not fill out the whole fare.

Now, the airlines don't like this, but there's no reason why you can't. It's your ticket. You can get off at the middle of your destination. If you buy a bus ticket and you choose to get off at a stop before your ticket, you bought the ticket. It's your choice to get off.

And so you can use this with airlines as well. And so Kiwi will show me those. They'll also put together different companies. So it doesn't have to always be just one company from A to B. It'll show me a few different airlines all put together. So Kiwi is my preferred tool.

The apps of both of these are really good. So you can use the flight. So if I'm going to search for a place, I'll go to flight connections, get an idea of what's available. I'll look at my destination city and I'll get an idea of, OK, once I'm there, where am I going to be able to fly?

What price is? And then I'll use kayak and Kiwi to look for airplane tickets until I find and book something. So that's the first stage is getting there, usually via airplane. Now, what about staying there? What do you do if you want to stay somewhere here? There are, once again, lots and lots of options and your options will vary regionally.

So I'll tell you just my top three, the top three that I wind up using a lot. The first app that I use frequently is Airbnb. Now, we don't necessarily always stay in Airbnb. I find Airbnb is useful in some cases and not so useful in others. But Airbnb has a very useful search tool.

What I'll do is I'll use Airbnb as my baseline. I'll go to a place, I'll search for a month long rental. By doing a month long rental in a place, you'll often get sometimes a 50 percent discount on their nightly rates. And that'll give me an idea of what's available in a certain place.

So if I'm going to go to Lisbon, here's a month long rental. I can rent an apartment for this amount. I can rent a house for this amount. Here's what my cost is going to be. And then now I have a baseline idea. The next app that I will use is Booking.com.

Now, of course, there are competitors to all of these. There's hotels. There's, you know, competitor Airbnb. There's VRBO. But Booking, I find, is really good. And Booking will include lots of local hotels and it will include international hotels and it'll often include apartment rentals as well. So Booking is good and Booking has a great cancellation policy, generally speaking, as well.

So I have found Booking to be, if I'm just going to do something fast and I'm not going to go through all of the apps that I can find, then I'll often use Booking.com. Third and finally, I keep, I have status in most of the major American hotel brands.

And most of the major international American hotel brands, right? Hilton, Marriott, IHG, that's not an American, but IHG and Hyatt. So these four have so many different brands that they're really useful. You could add Acor onto that in Europe. But these four brands I find really useful. And one of the nice things that I appreciate, it's funny, I consciously avoid flying on any American flagged carrier whenever possible.

So I avoid whenever possible, American Airlines, Delta, United, I avoid any American branded carrier. But I always will choose, if there's a price difference, I'll always choose an American flagged hotel brand because they just have great, reliable, consistent products. So, you know, you check into a Marriott anywhere around the world and it's good.

And so because I have status with most of those hotel brands, it usually works out a little bit better for me. They're a little bit more flexible with me, with my children, a little bit more indulgent on not giving me a hassle about having too many people in a room versus a lot of times the hassle of dealing with a local brand.

And also having everything just in an app on your phone where it's one app, it's all there. You can check in, you can cancel your reservations. Everything is good, is really, really useful. Those are the primary tools. I've tried to pick three for how to get there, three for how to stay.

And then, of course, once you're there, what are your solutions? So there's no question that Uber is usually a phenomenal tool. And then what I'll do is once I get somewhere, I'll find out what the local version of Uber is and then try to choose also that local version of Uber.

So Uber is many places around the world, but for example, here in Malta, there isn't Uber. And so here the Uber equivalent is an app called Bolt. And so that's the one that I use. And so I'll find the local ride sharing app, look for a local taxi app.

And then as far as -- I'm not going to go into restaurants and activities, et cetera. You can figure that stuff out on your own. But when you start using these tools and you just spend a little time, make a little hobby, look around, you'll find frequently that traveling is not as expensive as it once was.

Again, airfare is where there's so many times tremendous deals on airfare. And then hotels vary depending on the region, right? If you're in downtown Tokyo, you're going to have a very different scenario than if you're in Albania. It's just going to be a different market. But you'll feel confident if you just check those tools, right?

If you check booking.com, you check booking.com, you check Airbnb, you'll feel confident that those options are there for you. I want to strongly encourage you, get out and see the world if you're at all interested. We live in a wonderful time to do it. So go after it. Talk to you soon.