Greyhound's loyalty program: Road Rewards

Greyhound bus has a pretty awesome loyalty program, the only downside being you have to ride Greyhound buses. Ha I kid, I kid. Or do I?

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OK anyway, you can check it out here, so I won't bore you with what's already clearly on the website. What it means, though, as far as I can tell, is that you could take 8 short/cheap round trips, even as a daily commute (for example, 45ish minutes between Delaware and Philadelphia), and then get a free round trip ticket across the country for you and a free companion. Not sure if you can stack the companion award on top of the free ticket like that, but the fine print never says you can't. So you could theoretically take 16 one-way $10 trips and then get a free trip across the country for you and a pal, round trip (worth maybe $300-400 per person), which is awesome as long as you don't mind being on the bus for like 30 hours. Or you could go somewhere else closer. Whatever tickles your fancy. Pretty awesome though! Points all expire after 1 year though, so I've never gotten that far. I have gotten the companion pass at the lower levels, though! Pretty neato.

So you wanna get across the US...

So you heard about some sweet travel deals on the coasts (WowAir's Valentine's Day $69 flight sale from San Francisco to London or Norwegian's just-announced $65 flights from the East coast to Scotland and Ireland, for example), and now you gotta get there. Now, each airport has different requirements regarding public transit, and I'm not going to go into that too much. Here is a basic guide on some ways you can get across America on the cheap, roughly rated from cheapest to least cheap.


0. Hitchhiking? I've never done it. Some friends have. They like it. I can't speak to it, and I probably wouldn't recommend it if you have a flight to catch as it's a slow process. But hey, I figured I'd include it so I don't look like a capitalist square.

1. Megabus, baby! Megabus releases at least one (but usually more than one) $1 ticket for EVERY bus, including the super-long-haul Dallas-to-Chicago and Chicago-to-New York. Megabus has routes along the West coast, and it connects the East from the coast all the way to Nebraska. So you can NOT Megabus all the way across the country, but you can get pretty close. You can find these if you're lucky sometimes, or you can get notified when they release a new batch of tickets and be pretty much guaranteed to snatch them up then. You can join my email list at the top of this page to get notified. You can also join the Megabus email list and they will occasionally notify you about other fun things, like the just-ended Marry-Me-on-a-Megabus contest. (Yes, really, you can enter to win to get married on a Megabus. Isn't that more like losing the sweepstakes? Even if it has fun decor. On the other hand, you can now get married at Taco Bell in Las Vegas, which sounds pretty ace.) Personally, I'd do a $1 miserable ultra-long cross-country Megabus trip if it would save me a hundred bucks. But boy, if you get motion sick like I do, you're better off Megabusing for like 9 hours or less.

2. Frontier and Spirit Airlines sales, brah! These are a lifesaver, and by that I mean I booked a $1 Megabus ticket from New York to Chicago, and then a $20 Frontier sale showed up, and I said, well hey, for $19 more I will not have to sit in a bus all night. Frontier and Spirit sales happen constantly and generally change multiple times a week. Know your hub! That would make a cool bumper sticker, and what it means is that these aren't the big guys, and they don't fly from every airport. So check their websites and see where they fly from, and where the sales tend to go to. For example, Frontier nearly always has some kind of sale to Orlando and Denver, and Spirit has some great deals to Las Vegas pretty often, so your cheapest bet to get fully cross-country without killing too much time on a bus would be flying Spirit to Las Vegas and then taking a Megabus or Greyhound from there to LA or wherever. Frontier usually has deals for flights on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Sometimes these show up the day before, sometimes a couple months. It's a bit of a crapshoot, though, because the regular flight might cost over $100 and you may not catch a deal.

3. Greyhound, amigo! I don't really love taking the Greyhound bus. I've had some bad experiences with shockingly rude staff and incompetency that nearly got me and another rider stranded on two separate occasions, and the prices aren't as absurdly cheap as Megabus - a cross-country ticket will set you back up to $259 one way, and no less than $100 no matter when you book. That said, they really go everywhere. So if you don't live anywhere near a Megabus stop, Greyhound can be a good bet. They also have a really kickin' loyalty program, which you can hack to get basically a free ticket anywhere. More on that later.

4. Er...am I forgetting anything? I think that's basically it. America doesn't have much in terms of rideshare sites, as far as I can tell. Sometimes people post rideshares up on Craigslist. You can keep an eye on sites like theflightdeal, Secret Flying, and Fly4Free for occasional big-airline deals, but you have to be lucky to catch one if you're not flexible. Amtrak is so expensive, I've never seen it as a cheaper option to flying.


Any other things I'm missing? Comment to let me know! Also, sign up for my email list at the top of the page if you want to get an auto-email every time I post, which is only sometimes, but always quality.

NORWEGIAN $65 TRANSATLANTIC US -> UK/IRELAND FLIGHTS ARE ON!!!!

HO MY GAWD YOU GUYS, NORWEGIAN HAS FINALLY RELEASED THEIR $65 TRANSATLANTIC FLIGHTS!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here's the lowdown: fly from a few lesser-used US airports near New York, Boston, and Hartford into Edinburgh, Cork, Dublin, Belfast, or Shannon for literally $65 on select dates starting in mid-June. Lining up a cheap return ticket can be hard, but if you check the fare calendars, you'll see that there are tickets coming back for only 69 GBP, which is like $86, or maybe a few dollars less if you can pay in euros instead. Fly mid-June until next February. Check it out!

We have been waiting for this for over a year, so this is SO EXCITING!

In case you're new to Norwegian, here's the lowdown. There are NO hidden taxes or fees, but neither are there any freebies. Expect no free meals, no free checked bags, no free cancellation or free changes, and no free seat reservation. You do get a free carry-on and personal item, with a combined weight of only 10 kg. I am like 95% sure you also get free movies, and they advertise free wifi on flights within Europe, not sure about long-haul. I've found their planes to be pretty comfy, as planes go. For the $65 flights, they picked airports that are a bit of a hassle to get to, but Google Maps and Rome2Rio know how to get anywhere, so use those if you get stuck!


P.S. You can now subscribe to this blog by typing your email address at the top of the page where it says "follow by email!" I've never had a mailing list before, so please let me know what you think of it, good/bad/etc.

WowAir Valentines $69 sale US to Europe all through 2017

Check out this awesome $69 flight sale between the US and Europe, with flights from all of WowAir's hubs (including San Francisco, Boston, Miami, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Berlin, and more). All round trips include a free stopover in Iceland, too. This will probably sell out very quickly. Get on it! Note that all of their flights to/from the US are fully refundable within 24 hours of booking, so you can buy now and think later! But like, think within the next 23 hours.