Why Do People Think I’m Always Traveling?

I can’t remember the last time that I was out with friends, family, or coworkers, and someone hasn’t made the comment “you seem like you’re always traveling”.

That always cracks me up. Sure, through the nature of having a travel blog, I’m sure that I talk about my travels more often than the average person. But I really don’t feel like I travel that much more than my friends and coworkers, considering that we are all working within the same confines of the standard US paid-time-off benefit of about 15-20 vacation days a year.

So it got me thinking, what am I doing differently to appear to travel more than others. Or said another way, what are others not doing to better maximize their travel time?

Here are 4 things that come to mind:

1. Using points and miles

Time and money are 1a and 1b in terms of the biggest barriers between you and the trip of a lifetime. Having a healthy balance of points and miles on-hand allows you to travel on the cheap, and in many cases, pretty darn close to free. For short trips, since airfare and hotels stays are the lion’s share of the budget, you’re no longer worried about getting your money’s worth when you’re playing with house money by using points and miles.

Therefore, those points and miles can completely change your mindset of what a weekend getaway can be. In fact, if the opportunity arises, we wouldn’t hesitate to book an international weekend getaway and have managed to do so in the past without taking a single day off of work.

2. Work hard, travel hard

I’m not the type of person that wants to spend a month in the same destination, soaking in all the sights, sounds, and culture of a specific place and becoming a pseudo-local.

I want to travel to as many places as possible, eat and drink to the brink of vomiting, and then return home to my daily routine. We’ve done multiple international trips where we’ve stayed for just 1 or 2 nights before coming home, and for us, 4 nights in the Maldives felt like an eternity.

That style of travel just isn’t possible to sustain for long periods of time, which is why I’m not averse to taking multiple, short trips.

So the math is simple – if each of my trips is half as long as yours, I can take twice as many within the same allotment of vacation days.

3.  Increase a week of vacation time by more than 50%

Paid time off is typically described in weeks. While a full week is 7 days, since you already get the weekends off, a “week” of vacation is just the 5-day period from Monday to Friday.

When we take time off, we always leverage the weekends, often times leaving Friday night (or just after midnight on Saturday) and returning the following Sunday. So in terms of real time, that same 5-day period of vacation time has been stretched to 7-9 days by using the weekends on both sides of the week.

Some people may say that coming back the day before returning to week is too tiring and exhausting, and it’s true. There’s nothing worse than being at work on Monday morning when you’re severely jet lagged. But in my mind it’s just not worth sacrificing a day of travel to return home early to recover.

4. Holidays are the best time to travel

To build on #3, traveling during the Holidays and 3-day weekends can really stretch your vacation time. For example, last year by leveraging the Thursday/Friday that we had off for Thanksgiving, we left on Wednesday for a 5-day trip to Europe while taking just 1 day off of work.

While domestic travel during 3-day weekends and holidays can be expensive, it’s actually a perfect time go to travel internationally. Thanksgiving and Christmas in particular are well-known for providing premium cabin flight deals, and award availability is amazing if you’re willing to travel on holidays like Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve.

I understand that it may be a non-starter for many people who want to spend the holidays at home, but for us it’s worked out very well.

There are many tactics that you can use to maximize your vacation time, what are some of your best tips and tricks?