Canadian Travel Hacking with PointsNerd

We managed to find flight availability from Istanbul to Cape Town on Turkish Airlines so we snapped up the opportunity to fly them a second time.  Similar to the first time, the flight was a red eye and left very late at night (or very early in the morning depending on how you look at

I have to admit that the thing I was looking forward to the most on this trip was a lounge … but not just any lounge, the Turkish Airlines CIP Lounge in Istanbul.  The CIP stands for Commercially Important Person, the European equivalent to North America’s VIP and do they ever pull out all the stops

I have to admit that Istanbul has always been on my bucket list of cities to visit but on this particular day, I was just as excited to fly Turkish Airlines Business Class for the first time.  It seems that airlines all around the world just get it right compared to our North American brethren.

On this trip, I ran into two terrible lounges.  This is one of them. On the surface, this lounge is fine.  The seating is comfortable, there are decent food options, there’s free booze as well as magazines and newspapers.  The thing that absolutely destroys my opinion of this lounge is how busy it is.  These

After a nice day exploring Montreal, we headed to Montreal’s Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport to catch our flight to Istanbul but first, we decided to check out some lounges. The first lounge we went to was the Maple Leaf Lounge and in my opinion, while a lot smaller, the lounge was much nicer than the

Toronto to Montreal is a very quick flight, in fact it’s only 48 minutes in the air and 1:09 gate to gate so this review is a short one.  Even so, there are benefits to flying in Business Class (AKA J Class) but I wouldn’t recommend expending additional points to fly in J for this short of

We had about 2.5 hours in Toronto where we were connecting to our first mini-destination on our trip around the world, Montreal.  Because we were travelling in Business Class, we had access to the Maple Leaf Lounge in Toronto.  Now Air Canada’s largest hub is Toronto so you would expect that the flagship MLL would be

Getting on an airplane at 12:05AM is not the most pleasant experience.  Having that flight delayed until 1:08AM makes it even worse.  Add to that the flight from Calgary to Toronto is only 3 hours and 7 minutes often makes the redeye a tough pill to swallow. Normally I wouldn’t take a flight at this

Calgary is home for me and while I’ve stopped chasing airline status a long time ago, the Maple Leaf Lounge was always one of the aspirational things that I wanted access to when I started down the path of travel hacking.  There’s just something about being able to go somewhere where the general public isn’t

My dad always taught me to use my brains and not my brawn to make money.  I always took that message to heart in everything that I do.  I guess that’s why I got into earning and burning points.  I always loved travelling but couldn’t always afford to do it so I decided, over 15 years