How Learning to Travel for Free Can Boost Your Career

Travel hacking is the art of using the rules and loyalty programs set by airlines, hotels, and credit card companies to get free travel. In addition to getting free vacations, practicing travel hacking can help you develop skills and habits that accelerate your career.
Reap the Benefits of (Free!) Travel
Traveling has many benefits, such as improved job performance, avoiding burnout and broadening your horizons
Take Your Vacation Days
Don’t let your vacation days go to waste! Taking the time to step away from your desk is great for your mental health, productivity, happiness, and stress-reduction.
Venture Out of Your Comfort Zone
Exploring the world improves your cultural curiosity and acceptance of cultural differences, allowing you to have a greater appreciation for the diversity of thought within your own organization.
Understand the History and Current Events of the World
Planning a vacation? You’ll want to do some research before-hand on the best things to do, places to stay, things to eat, etc. Keeping up-to-date with the local news in your desired destination proves useful when interacting with the customs, culture, and people of the specific destination, helping to build upon skills that are easily transferable in a personal and/or professional setting.
Be the Best Version of You
As you learn how to think like a travel hacker, you’ll also find that the travel hacking hobby is full of skill-building opportunities for your career development.
Organization and Planning
Travel hacking requires you to get and stay organized. From tracking your spending to managing the logistics for your free vacations, you’ll get plenty of practice at putting together plans and executing them.
Communication
Even though travel hacking is growing in popularity, it is still a foreign concept to many people. The countless information regarding credit card offers, flight benefits, and membership perks can make traveling hacking less than ideal for some. Effectively communicating the plethora of topics in a digestible manner can help friends and/or co-workers is a valuable and transferable skill.
Self-Awareness
You learn so much about yourself when in a new environment. Whether it’s when you are on a vacation or in the office starting a new job, you learn about your hopes, fears, dreams, and motivations.
Additionally, you’ll learn more about how you operate under stress. Traveling and travel hacking are great practice arenas for staying calm when things inevitably don’t go according to plan. The ability to keep a cool head under this kind of pressure is invaluable at any stage of your career.
Conclusion
Picking up a new skill to boost your career can be time-consuming and challenging, but getting free travel out of it can help provide all the motivation you need! Not only will travel hacking help you to organize your finances and travel to your dream destination for next to nothing, but you will also practice planning strategically and fulfilling your goals. What hiring manager or potential client could say no to that?
Get started with your Travel Hacking Lifestyle by accessing the free upgrade email template today, so you can travel like a Queen!
Julia Menez is a writer, speaker, and founder of the travel hacking lifestyle website Geobreeze. After traveling to more than 30 countries before the age of 30 and saving thousands of dollars each year by travel hacking, Julia uses her “3 Points of the Travel Hacking Lifestyle” to teach time-crunched early career professionals how to hack time, travel, money, and productivity.
She utilizes these same techniques to successfully balance her work at Geobreeze with her full-time role as a global actuarial project manager and her position as the New York City chapter director for Wanderful, a global lifestyle brand helping women to travel the world.
Julia has been featured in Feedspot’s Top 40 Actuarial Blogs. She is available for comments and interviews regarding award travel, productivity, strategic planning hacks, personal finance, and women in business.
Amanda Holdsworth
Great post and I’m starting to think that perhaps I’ve been Travel hacking a bit all along!
May 5, 2020 at 8:12 am
Sophie
This is such a great point of view and I couldn’t agree more. I think that travel enriches every part of life and teaches us valuable skills we can apply in our personal growth and our careers. The idea of traveling for free is definitely intriguing!
June 6, 2020 at 3:39 pm