They’ve been the number one charge card for travel since 1958.

It makes sense to us. After all, the owners of Wells Fargo Bank and the Pony Express, started American Express and they have never looked back. AMEX has been exploring the new frontier since the rough and tumbling days of the Wild West.

It is no surprise then that our American Express Gold Rewards Card was accepted everywhere at the end of the world.

Fin Del Mundo – The End of the World is the nickname for Ushuaia, Argentina. Known as the southernmost city in the world it is also the jumping off point for cruising to the continent of Antarctica.

End of the World, Next Stop Antarctica

We’ve been using the American Express Gold Rewards Card for nearly a year now and we have found it to be an amazing tool for our travels.

Using our card for everyday purchases such as gas, groceries and at the pharmacy, we receive two Membership Rewards points for every dollar spent. Every time we get our statement we are surprised with how many points we have accumulated. We use it for everything and the rewards have been paying off.

When we first signed up for the card, we thought that we would use our rewards to transfer 1:1 to Aeroplan, but we have ended up using them through TripFlex instead.

When we make a travel purchase such as a night at a hotel or the purchase of a train ticket, we simply call up American Express and have them use our Membership Rewards points to pay off our travel spend. They cover all our travel costs including the taxes!

Signing Up

When you sign up for a Gold Rewards Card you automatically receive 15,000 bonus points once you spend $500 within the first three months of receiving your card. Plus American Express is waiving the $150 fee for the first year giving you the chance to test drive the card for yourself to see if it works for you.

Rewards:

Travel Insurance

“For short trips Travel Insurance can be an added cost. However we have been thrilled to use our American Express Card for Travel Insurance.  We have not had to buy additional insurance for our short trips to Jamaica, Mexico, Seattle, and Cairo.

For Antarctica we were away for 17 days. American Express gives card holders Emergency Medical coverage (out of province/home) for the first 15 consecutive days of travel regardless of whether they paid for their trip through American Express or not. Plus your card covers your spouse and children too!

We saved hundreds of dollars on travel insurance by having the American Express Gold Rewards Card. For Antarctica, all we had to do was give AMEX Canada a call and top up our two days of overstay for two people. It cost us $56 for two people to have medical insurance for 17 days of travel.

Hotels

Paying for Extra Costs with American Express

Quark Expeditions and Expedia.com covered our accommodations while we were in Ushuaii, but when we did have extra expenses such as transportation and hotel fees, we made sure to pay with our American Express Gold Rewards Card. When we returned home, we gave AMEX a call and had our costs covered using points.

On the Ship

Yes, American Express is accepted in Antarctica. Our ship, the Sea Spirit gladly accepted American Express and we put all our onboard expenses on our Gold Rewards Card.

What we love about American Express is that they give you way more for your rewards than other cards. We have another card that we never use because it takes twice the rewards to pay for $100 worth of travel spend.  We get double the bang for our buck and can stretch our rewards farther with American Express.

What Now?

We have used up all our remaining Membership Rewards points, but we made it through the holidays redeeming points for  several overnight stays in Toronto plus travel expenses in Cairo and of course Argentina. It’s the time of the year where we rely on points the most as the holidays and New Year seem to be when our wallets are at their slimmest.

Now, we are happy to re-build our points all year long to have that little next egg next holiday season to enjoy our time with family and friends.

The best news is, our points never expire, so if we don’t need to use them next holiday season because some miracle has happened like we’ve won the lottery, we can save them for a rainy day in the future.

Announcement

We will continue to bring you updates about the benefits of using American Express in the coming months as we continue to work with American Express Canada spreading the word about this awesome rewards card. We have enjoyed giving you, our readers these valuable tips and if we didn’t believe in American Express, we wouldn’t be writing about it. Like everything on ThePlanetD, we never endorse a product unless we are 100% behind it.

Apply For Your Card today

We’re on CTV News Express today again and we love having our posts go along with what we’re talking about on air. Seven minutes isn’t a lot of time for these two chatty people so we like to expand on what we could have, should have and would have said if we had unlimited time.

For more CTV New Express Segments check out our special TV appearances page

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So what’s that Travel Couple talking about today?

Saving money of course! 

With the holiday season coming fast, money is on everyone’s mind. We would love to be able to tell you all that we’re independently wealthy and don’t have to worry about a cent, but that is not the case. We have to think about every penny we spend on travel and we want to share our tips and tricks to making your future travels more affordable. So even though you have to watch your wallet for Christmas, that doesn’t mean you still can’t enjoy some of the finer things in  life. Just follow these budget savings tips and you’ll be able to travel more for less!

1 – Use a Travel Rewards Credit Card

Fillling up the car with our AMEX Gold Rewards

a. Rewards – Use a travel rewards credit card to accumulate mileage and receive bonus rewards for signing up. You have to spend money anyway, so it only makes sense to accumulate rewards as you shop. We use the American Express Gold Rewards card and wish that we started using it earlier. Every time we use our AMEX card we receive 1 point for every dollar spent. When using it at drug stores, grocery store or gas stations in Canada, we receive double the points!

b. Flexibility – We can book our own travel, pay for it with the AMEX Gold Rewards Card and then call American Express to have them pay for the purchase with our points, or we can transfer our points 1:1 to Aeroplan and use our points to earn a free flight! There are many other partners that you can transfer your rewards to as well such as  Alitalia, British Airways, Delta, Cathay Pacific, Hilton Honors, Starwood Preferred Guest and Priority Club.

c. Travel Insurance – When traveling for 15 days or less we automatically get travel insurance with our card. We save a lot of money on travel insurance. Hundreds of dollars a year!

d. Points never expire. What’s even better is that we have up to 12 months to decide whether we want to pay for our travel spend with our points or not. We can pay for our travel with our AMEX Gold Rewards Card and then we have an entire year to ask them to pay for our purchase with our rewards!

2 – Choose The Right Destination

Where you travel has a great impact on the cost of a trip. Travel to developing nations is a cheaper option.

Travel to Thailand or Vietnam is much cheaper than traveling to Bora Bora or Tahiti. Look for places that have a good infrastructure for independent travel where you can stretch your dollar and make it last longer. We can stay on a beach bungalow in Malaysia or Thailand for $10 a night as opposed to booking an expensive week at an overcrowded all inclusive Caribbean resort.  A Guest house in Honduras can go for $20 to $30 per night and meals at these destinations can be as low as $2-$3.  Beer is as low as a buck a bottle. Traveling to off the beaten path destinations will keep overpriced businesses in popular locations from digging too deep into your wallet and the local people of the not so well travelled places will be happy to have your business.

3 – Travel Independently

Shop Locally

Take Local Transport

4 – Use Alternative Accommodation

Our Campervan in New Zealand by AllWays Rentals

5 – Use a Travel Agent

Start by searching the Internet for prices and availability. When you have a good idea as to what things cost and what you want to spend go to your travel agent. They can still find you the best deal. They have an entire resource at their fingertips. They know the little tricks to find the best deal and they can compare many fares, airlines and dates at once.

Use a Travel Agent for Piece of Mind

a. Be Flexible – if you are willing to travel on a different day, you can possibly save hundreds of dollars on your flight. Flight costs vary from day to day. Booking on a Monday may not have the best deals as buying on a Thurday and the same can be said for flying. Flights may be cheaper if you fly on the weekend as opposed to Monday morning. Shop around and compare.

6. Time and Patience 

Bonus Tip: Bring a calculator.

NomadicMatt’s excellent ebook is on sale for the Holidays!

We are now traveling the world fulfilling our dream of being full time travelers.  It wasn’t always this way.  We had loved to travel, but had to keep coming home to work and save money between trips.

It wasn’t until we returned from 5 months in Africa that we decided to once and for all look into ways to make money with our travel blog.

Luckily, we found NomadicMatt’s website early on in our research and bought an invaluable book from him.

How to make Money with Your Travel Blog taught us insider secrets into how to earn an income while being on the road.

From SEO techniques, social networking to finding advertisers and optimizing your site, Matt’s book gives a step by step guide on how to achieve success.   This isn’t a get rich quick scheme and it doesn’t guarantee that you will be able to sustain a life of travel. However if you follow his guide and work hard at your blog, you to can be traveling the world like Matt and us!

The great news is that for the holiday season, Make Money with Your Travel Blog is on Sale.  It is only $17 dollars U.S. That is a 30% savings

Want to make a New Years Resolution to change your life?  That is exactly how we started.  It was a New Years Resolution in 2006 that turned into an adventure of a lifetime!

ThePlanetD has grown considerably over the past 6 months. We are starting to see a nice increase in traffic, we are selling adspace and people in the travel community are starting to take notice of us.  For that we are very thankful.  It wasn’t always this way though.

Dave and I started to blog way back in 2007 when we decided to take part in the 2008 Tour d’Afrique, a cycling race through Africa.  Back then, we didn’t know the first thing about Blogging.  All we knew was that some people kept a journal about their time in Africa the previous year and we enjoyed reading them so we decided to follow suit.

We started our own blog to track our training and preparations and then to let friends and family know how life was going while we were Africa.  When we returned home, we stopped Blogging and that was the end of that.

We never dreamed that someone could actually make money off of Blogging.

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It wasn’t until this past April that we actually looked into the business of Blogging. We stumbled upon it really, we were looking into travel writing and how to submit to magazines and newspapers.  As we followed links from one blog to another looking for information, we came across a great travel website called NomadicMatt.com We have learned a great deal in the past 6 months and one of the biggest contributors to our progress has been by following Matthew Kepnes word of wisdom in How to Make Money With Your Travel Blog.

It is a perfect book for people starting out as well as for established Bloggers that haven’t moved their blog beyond a few hundred hits a day and a couple of bucks from Adsense a month.  Matts book will give you the tools that you need to learn how to find readers, what price to charge advertisers and how to raise your profile on the Internet.  I don’t think that we would be near as far along with our Blog if it weren’t for this ebook.

We frequently go back to his book and reference sections and chapters.  When we need something clarified or need to ask a question, Matt always takes the time to help.  He doesn’t have to, but that is just the kind of person that he is.  Helpful.

He covers everything in the book right from the basics of setting up your blog to selling ad space.  He teaches you how to increase traffic, utilize social networking, and he talks about search engine optimization.  It is all very easy to follow and understand.

Matt is living proof that making a living off of travel blogging can be done.  He makes up to $3000 a month on his websites and he is living the dream as a full time traveler and who better to take advice from than a professional sharing his expertise.

Since Dave and I are going through this again right now, we thought that it would be a good time to let you know how we prepare all of our banking and financing before a world travel.

It can be a little overwhelming when you leave for a trip putting all of your accounts in order, but if you take it step-by-step, things can go pretty smoothly and you can travel worry free.

The first thing that I do is go through our wallets to see what cards we will be taking and what we will leave behind.  I make a note to contact every account to tell them that we will be overseas.  Some banks and credit cards will freeze accounts when they see them being used in a foreign country unless they are notified.

Next I make sure that we have a variety of cards that will be compatible worldwide.  We have found that cards that use the Cirrus system work well, but we also use Plus and Maestro.

I write down all of the important numbers and contact information that I will need for each account.

I then write down account numbers to store in a safe place. You need to have this on hand in case anything goes missing.

We have several different accounts with different pin numbers. I make sure to write down little hints as to what each pin is.  If anything gets stolen, they won’t be able to figure out what all of these random numbers and words mean, but I know what it all means.  We also email ourselves the same hints just in case.

• I have heard of the online pin storage sites, but I have yet to use them. Maybe we will this trip after some more investigation.  But there is nothing safer in my opinion than not having pins stored anywhere, just some random hints that don’t make sense to anyone but me.

The next thing we do is get our online banking in order and set up pre-authorized and scheduled payments. We basically set up all of our banking for the time that we will be gone.  Bill payments, investments, money transfers…they are all done ahead of time so that we are not worrying about monthly expenses while we are away.

Organizing your Finances Before Leaving the Country is the Key

We also use a separate account for bills at home from the account we will be using on the road.

This is not mandatory, but we make sure to have a monthly payment to our credit card that we use for travel whether we use it or not.  Just in case we can’t get to an internet by the time the due date comes around, we are content in knowing that at least the minimum payment will be taken care of.   We would hate to miss a payment and have our cards declined if we needed them.

We also make sure that we have a savings account that is linked to our account that we are using to travel that we can transfer money to and from.  We don’t keep a lot of money in our travel account at one time as ATM’s can be greatly compromised.  Transfers are set up before leaving home to go into our account monthly to fit our budget.

We pay very close attention to our finances while traveling. We have our credit monitored to make sure nobody has gotten our information and we check our accounts regularly to make sure that things haven’t come out that shouldn’t have.

We also leave a banking account number with a family member at home in case we need them to put money into our account.  It is good to have all avenues covered in case of an emergency.

So that is what we do  to prepare our finances while we are traveling. Knock on wood, all has gone well, but we are always learning new tricks.

Do you have any hints or suggestions to make your banking while traveling easier?