How To Have The Perfect Flight: Part 1

Only A Bag - The Guide To Italian Travel

In recent years, the flight has somehow become the worst part of any trip. It's not just the delays and cancellations, but the baggage fees, the seat selection fees if you'd like to do something crazy like sit next to the people you're traveling with, and even the tiny, narrow seats. In this episode (and the next one) we delve into how to prepare for a flight and how to maximize (or minimize) your time in an airport.

Because we completely forgot, we also briefly touch on using your credit card travel portal (like Capital One Travel or Chase Travel) to book a flight since they have baked-in protection like price-drop protection and lost baggage reimbursement.

You don't need a travel credit card to use these platforms, we use basic, no foreign-transaction fee credit cards like the Savor One and Quicksilver (both are referral links).

As we mention in this episode (and the next) something that we've found to be priceless is a power bank. Even though we don't put our boarding passes on our phones, having our phone die while in the midst of a trip can be disastrous. If you'd like to support Only A Bag, you can use our affiliate link for Belkin. However, pretty much any power bank will work!

Lastly, as we mentioned in the previous episodes, we rarely book flights through an aggregate, preferring to use the airline's website or our credit card's travel portal. When looking for hotels, we usually cross-reference ⁠Booking*⁠, ⁠Expedia*⁠, ⁠Priceline⁠, and ⁠Agoda*.⁠ (Affiliate links are marked with an asterisk.) We typically book with ⁠Booking.com*⁠ because we like their “Genius” deals and it seems like they often have the best or comparable prices.

While Booking, Expedia, and Priceline do offer flight booking we usually use ⁠Google Flights⁠ or ⁠ITA Flight Matrix⁠ (also by Google) to find the price-range and then book the flight directly through the carrier or credit card portal.

Thank you so much for listening! We would absolutely appreciate it if you could follow us and rate us wherever you listen; it helps the podcast grow and it makes us feel like we're making a difference!

You can find us at ⁠onlyabag.com⁠ and ⁠@onlyabagpodcast⁠.