Nice article in today's Gizmodo about someone who's sorted out a cool six months off on under US$500.

In the article he does give props to flyertalk:

http://gizmodo.com/5710654/how-to-fl...yline=true&s=i

So the guy basically grabs a bunch of credit card bonuses and then does a couple of big award itineraries, and pays a bit for taxes and fees... nothing out of the ordinary here.

The guy's writing, to me, read like an advertisement for miracle hair growth stuff.

Instead of buying Chris Guillebeau's Frequent Flyer Master $50 e-book, I think he should have just suggested using frugal travel guy's blog. Reading flyertalk can be somewhat overwhelming for someone who just wants the basics, and if you don't have the time to dig around on this site or his blog... shell out $7 for his ebook and help support the troops.

Hey at least he didn't mention buying coins from the us mint ^

A lot of the content that gizmodo puts out is pretty much ads similar to this. They hire like 20 non-paid interns to search the internet for geeky stories that their audience will like, post it on the blog, you click on it thinking it will be a real story and it's just a paragraph and a link to another page. Pretty much a blog form of digg.com before that website went down hill. Everyone once and a while they put out their own stories, but now after the incident with the iphone and banned from any Apple press event... their stories have really gone down hill.

They really should have renamed the story. Seems like the guy is just putting his life on hold, selling off of his stuff, and looking to travel for cheap. 10 months of traveling = a lot of hostel and hotel nights, not sure how he will pay for all that.

Also discussed here

I've done two of these RTW's with the Oneworld award but in Business Class. I think it is the best long distance award out there. The upcharge to biz class is only 50K from the 140K he paid. I wonder why he didn't move up to biz? My taxes were also around $400 per ticket

And we got 58 of 61 hotel nights free as well. Our miles earning on card churning last year was 1,050,000 for the two of us

Based on what he posted, simply not enough miles.

Holy crap! Is that still possible - with the new churning rules and all? I'm 7 months into the mileage game, and I'm willing to do ANYTHING to get as many miles as humanly possible.

Rick, I think you should offer to be a guest blogger for gizmodo like Lucky does for another website. You could bring in a whole new generation of frugal travelers.