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HOW TO ORGANIZE,

PACK AND TRAVEL


EFFICIENTLY

Transcripts
Kevin’s Story on Efficient Travel
Video 1

Hello everyone! My name is Kevin and I will be going through the dojo module on efficient travel with
you all. I have had to learn and master efficient travel as a byproduct of what I do for a living. I work
in a role that requires frequent short and long term travel to different customer locations usually
from one week for shorter trips up to three weeks at a time when I’m on the longer ones. Some of
this came from following my father who traveled for his work for a short time.

I remember once on vacation as a child when he took us into a travel lounge for the first time, I was
amazed at an airport could be so quiet. Don’t fret if you’ve never traveled to before, you already
have a lot of the mindset to do it efficiently by being here. There’s a quote that’s probably used way
too often but I love. “Wherever you go, there you are.” As in, if you are somewhere else you’re still
the same person you’ve always been. And being here you’re productive and looking to learn. Several
processes you already have will be utilized as part of traveling efficiently as well as I’ll be giving you
a crash course in recommended applications and travel programs to get you up to speed very quickly.

One thing I want you to have done before we move on, think through everything you feel you may
need to fly somewhere for a week. Don’t think too much about it. Don’t think about it there’s too
much, if it’s not the right stuff. The important thing right now is just to write it all down. We’ll be
coming back to this list later. Hope you’re just as excited as I am to get the started and I’ll see you
on the next video.

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The Work You Can Do Now
Video 2

Hi! This is Kevin and this is module two of efficient travel. The work you can do now. You’re not
flying right now, so this module is here to give you some advice that you can utilize right now so that
when it is time to fly you’re ready to go and you’re much more efficient.

The first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to recommend two applications for you, and those are
Trip it and App in The Air. I’m going to give you a demonstration on how these two work together at
the end of this module, and you’ll see how they work together so well and why they are a critical
part of being able to travel efficiently. In particular, the big thing that Trip it does is it allows you to
forward any travel related e-mail to create a custom itinerary. Pretty much what it lets you do is any
time you get a car rental, a flight, a hotel, you get receipts for those. You would just forward those
to plans@tripit.com and since it knows that e-mail address it’s coming from is the one tied to your
account, it automatically ties it to you and starts building a custom itinerary that you can look at at
any time. You can refer back to and you can send it to anybody, and you just have all of your travel
documentation, your confirmation numbers, your flights, your reservations, they’re all in one loca-
tion. You don’t have to keep digging everywhere for all of your information.

And there is a paid tier, and what that lets you do is it lets you be able to get live sinking informa-
tion of your flights. So let’s say you’re at the airport and your gate changes, that can let you really
quickly but the app would immediately let you know if your gate changes or if your flight is delayed.
Sometimes even before it hits the monitors themselves. And that is a paid feature of Trip it. Howev-
er, you can get it for a much more affordable price and in my opinion with better functionality if you
also utilize App in The Air. App in The Air is a separate flight tracking program and it’s able to fully
sync everything from Trip it just as well as you could use their own service. But I like combining it
with Trip it because you can use Trip it service for all of your other stuff such as your hotels and your
car rentals. And it’s at a much more affordable price points.

There is a plan for unlimited which is around the same price points of getting one year of Trip it pro,
if you’re going to get that. However, you can also purchase it a la carte. You can purchase it for just
one flight or five flights. And so if you only fly every so often, you can get just the package for that
period of time. It also lets you create different people that can get push notifications when you’re
flying. So let’s say you have a significant other or family who might be nervous about what’s going to
happen to you on that day if you travel, you can add them as people who can get notifications and
what notifications they get. So that way when you take off and you touch down they’re able to get
all of that information. And it just makes things a lot more easy and a much simpler process when
you travel. And it relieves quite a bit of peace of mind.

Speaking of peace of mind another headache we all have to deal with whenever we’re traveling is
the lines when you have to go through security. And there are two particular features that I would
like to recommend to you to be able to potentially skip those lines, and those would be TSA Precheck
and Global Entry. Now, between the two personally, I’m a much larger fan of Global Entry. However,

AE DOJO | HOW TO ORGANIZE, PACK AND TRAVEL EFFICIENTLY 3


it does have a few more requirements that are a bit more stringent. And so it may not be what
you’re looking for but I’m going to break down both of them right now for you. The big thing about
PreCheck is it lets you use an express line through security. And the big things it lets you do is you
don’t have to take your liquids out of your bag. You don’t have to take stuff off your purse and you
don’t have to take your laptop out, take your shoes off. You don’t have to use the body scanner you
just get to use a regular metal detector. If you’ve ever flown before the TSA was put into practice,
you’ll remember that this was kind of the way it used to be before all that came in. And what this
does is kind of gives you a time machine to bring you back in time to that time. And the way they do
that is you are vetted as a low risk flight traveler. So when you’re flying they’re not as worried about
you going through a lower level of security because you’ve already been prevented. And because of
that, there is a background check and you submit your fingerprints as part of that to apply for TSA
Precheck. There is a fee and it’s 85 dollars but it is valid for five years.

Now, what Global Entry does is it’s through Custom Border Protections instead of through the TSA.
But it provides you all the benefits of TSA PreCheck. And the extra piece is it gives you accelerated
processing through customs. So if you ever fly internationally, you can actually go through customs
in about five minutes. You just go to a kiosk. It takes your photo, takes a picture of your passport.
You scan your fingerprints and you answer the questions on this kiosk the same ones you would get
on your declaration form if you ever come into the country. It’s the same one that’s the flight at-
tendants would hand you. Just on the screen this time. You get a little printout, you hand that to
the customs agents and you are through. Now, if you go this route, it’s actually probably better for
you to carry on your bags if you can because you’re going to go through customs a lot faster than
you would get in your bag. You’ll be waiting for that potentially more than you’ll be waiting for your
friends you didn’t get Global Entry. Now, this one is a little bit more expensive but not by too much.
It’s a hundred dollars and it’s also valid for five years. You do have to get a background check and fin-
gerprints like before but the extra pieces are, you get your photograph taken and you have to regis-
ter, schedule, and have an interview with border protection. There are only a few airports that have
this. So you have to check into your different area to see if where your closest location is and it is a
little bit more involved because it’s having had this interview in person and it can take some time to
get it.

Now I understand not everyone would want to go through this extra level of processing, so if that
is something you don’t want to go through, PreCheck is still an option. Now I will let you know at
least when I got mine a few years ago, it wasn’t a really intense interview or anything like that. It’s
mostly just asking questions about your history, things like that and you should be fine. It’s more just
tense for having an interview overall.

Now once you get one of these to, what you’re going to want to do is create an account with every
single airline that you potentially may fly with. And the reason is when you get PreCheck or Global
Entry, you’re going to be given a known traveler number. That number is what gives you the ability
to skip the line. What gives you that PreCheck access every time you fly. But the only way for it to be
tied to you is for that account to be put into the system for that particular airline. So once you get
these, make sure you create accounts for every single airline and plug your known traveler number
in there.

AE DOJO | HOW TO ORGANIZE, PACK AND TRAVEL EFFICIENTLY 4


If you’re curious about what that redress number is, that’s right next to that. If you are unfortunate
enough to have your name be that of someone who’s on the no fly list, sometimes you can have some
headaches when you’re flying. And if you’re able to show, “Look I’m not that John Doe”, you would
get a redress number that gets put into your profile so you don’t constantly get flagged for being on
the no fly list. Luckily that’s not me. So as you can see that field is empty for me.

The next group that I would highly recommend creating accounts with would be for car rental agen-
cies. And that would be the ones such as Hertz, National, Avis, Enterprise and so on. The big reason
you want to get these is they allow instant pickup of your vehicle. If you’ve never gone through be-
fore, you have to stand in the line, provide your information then, talk to the agent, and then they’ll
give you the keys to your car. For smaller airports, not necessarily that big of a deal but it can be a
massive headache if you don’t. The one thing is a credit card is required to be on file for when you
do this but it’s not going to be charge. It’s just there so a credit card is on file for when you ever do
choose to rent a vehicle. Kind of the same way you would likely have a credit card on file with Ama-
zon or with a hotel group.

To share a story about why this is incredibly important, a few months ago I flew into Denver Inter-
national Airport for a business trip. And I happened to be going with the agency that I’ve never gone
through before, because the one that we normally contract with was actually out of cars because
it was the peak of tourist season. And I didn’t think anything of it. I just figured I’d pick up my car
when I got there. Wouldn’t be that big of a deal. Aah! That was my line and it’s about as bad as
you think it is. It took me about an hour and 20 minutes to get in my car. Don’t be like me, please,
please get this set up with every single rental agency. So you don’t go through this headache. You’ve
already got enough stress and have burned enough time while you’ve been flying.

Now one last piece I want to go through here as some options that you can have for traveling is to
potentially look into specific credit cards. I’ll go into some more detail about this in the flying mod-
ule to talk about the particular benefits for when you’re flying. But just to give you a quick overview,
it’s completely optional you don’t have to do this. I understand not everyone wants to do credit
cards but if you do travel frequently, some cards can very much be worth it. Particularly with being
able to get lounge access, with being able to get status with different hotels so you get things like
free breakfasts, or status or similar tiers you would get status with an airline such as priority board-
ing, or free checked bags, or being able to not pay fees to get superior seats. Things like that. And
the ones I recommend for general travel are the AMEX Platinum or the Chase Sapphire Reserve. For
a specific airline, I would recommend, for example the American Express Sky Miles Gold card, the
Platinum is another option but I wouldn’t recommend that unless you’re really trying to go for sta-
tus. The difference between the two in my opinion is not worth the difference in annual fee as well
as the Chase United Explorer if you’re looking to potentially fly with United.

For specific hotels, some really good ones are the AMEX Hilton Surpass, the Chase Hyatt, and Chase’s
IHG. For example, IHG gives you one three nights a year at any IHG hotel and that easily covers the
annual fee for that. As well as the Hilton Surpass, immediately gives you gold status with Hilton. And
if you stay at Hilton’s at all, you’ll know some do provide free breakfast but a lot of the higher tier
ones do not. And that’s the case of a lot of the major brands, they don’t offer breakfast unless you
have a higher tier of status. And with this, you get the breakfast covered for everyone in your party.

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And at Hilton Garden Inns which I happen to go to quite a bit, it would cost you about 12-15 dollars a
person. So if you stay for a family of four, you stay for two nights, you’ve already made the costumer
annual fee for that. And to finish up here, I’m going to give you a demo of Trip it and App in The Air
working together to show you why that’s such a critical component. And I’ll see you in just a second.

All right and here is Newton, App in the Air, and Tripit. Newton is my e-mail app and as you can see,
I just opened a hotel receipt for going to Seattle in December. And I’m going to forward this email
to plans@tripit.com. And that’s going to pull it right into the system. You don’t have to worry about
that. That’s just a thing to see if I attach something. But that’s not the case here. So now that I’ve
forwarded that to plans@tripit.com since I already have an account, they know that to be my per-
sonal e-mail address. I can just open up Trip it and you’ll see here that it’s going to come in. You can
set it to always scan your e-mail or you can set it to forward, and that’s what I do because I don’t
want to just give them 100 percent access to my e-mail.

Now it’s not instant but it’s very very quick. As you can see there, it just pulled it in. And it sees
now from that reservation, what I have there. And you can see there, it has my check in time, it has
the confirmation number it has my booking information, it has everything in there. So it’s all there
in one place. And if I had flight tickets or car tickets, I could throw them in here too. And I’m just
going to go through a couple of the other options here. Now like the profile you can add other e-mail
addresses. But I’d have to set up a pen right now so I’m not just going to do that. You can throw your
documents in there. Things like that.

And now the next thing is we’re going to open up App in the Air. Now, I can’t directly show you the
flight right now because I don’t have one with it. But what you can see here real quickly is my pro-
file. And one neat thing is it saves all of your flight history here. You can see I have flown almost
100,000 miles and 261 hours in the air which is pretty crazy. It also shows you my path that I’ve
taken through every flight I’ve taken since I’ve been using the combination together. It pulls all this
information in. As you can see, a lot of time in the states little bit abroad.

You also get these little achievements for how many miles you’ve flown, what locations you go to.
One funny one there. The time travel that’s because I flew in such a way that when I arrived, I went
back in time which is kind of neat. But what we’re here for is the information that gets sync. Now
this is an example, from one flight that I took before and receive their flight alerts, those are the
other people you can add to give them the information, the flight type of vehicle that I’m on, ratings
for the airline and stuff. The tips and things for every airline are usually very stupid because no one
really uses it, so you get silly things like try the airplanes or don’t bring a snow glove through securi-
ty, stuff like that. And I’m going back to here to another one. You can see same thing here where you
get the ratings and things like that. And I’m going to scroll up here in just a minute and show you
what kind of information you can get from the subscriptions for the flight alerts. So I have the push
alerts active on a lifetime subscription and those are the options for different things you could have
sent to people. So if you get delayed, if your gate changes, things like that, and you can set a differ-
ent for you and for everyone else. Anyway that’s App in the Air, Trip it, and my e-mail and I hope you
found this very useful.

AE DOJO | HOW TO ORGANIZE, PACK AND TRAVEL EFFICIENTLY 6


Packing For Travel
Video 3

Hello everyone. This is Kevin Clack with module 3 of Essential Travel and we’re going to be going
through packing for travel. I’m going to go through what I would recommend for packing, from
equipment to what you pack itself. And then we’re going to end with a demo of using OmniFocus
and Editorial together to create your checklist of everything that you need when we fly, and you can
easily regenerate it anytime you fly.

First, what I would recommend carry on everything you can. This will save you fees for having to
check your bag. It will knock out wear and tear but you get on your bags as well as you will get out
of the airport a lot faster since you don’t have to wait the extra 20 minutes or so for baggage claim.
The best way I recommend to do this is with a combination of a backpack and a carry on bag. That
way you can put your backpack under your seats and your carry on bag can go in the overhead bin
above you. Now for backpacks, I’m going to recommend three to you. The first is the Incase EO.
I’m biased here because it’s the one that I personally use. And what I like about it is it’s a tech and
travel bag put together. The front has a lot of easy to access pouches and locations free to put all of
your different pieces of technology. And the back has a section for a full sized computer as well as a
tablet. In the middle section is a full piece of luggage that can be compressed together and can fit
depending on how you pack between three to five days of clothes for that duration. So it’s entirely
possible to only travel with this bag. Now that’s the case for a lot of these but just from my personal
use, I can say that this bag has worked with me for the last two years and has been perfectly fine.
Now the only problem with this one is it’s no longer being made. There are still several people on
Amazon who are selling this bag. With what inventory they have. But as far as I’m aware I do not
believe that it is currently being produced anymore. So I have two more for you.

The second one is from Tom Bihn and it’s pretty much anything from their inventory. Tom Bihn makes
fantastic travel bags and pretty much any kind of bag in general. You can actually go to their web-
site, put in a slider of the size you’re looking for, what you’re looking for and you will be given a
selection of ones that they believe would be the best fit for you. And they are really clean, really
durable. I’ve heard nothing about them that have been bad. They are a little bit pricey but as it
comes into this field, you often get what you pay for. Now in travel sometimes you get a little bit of
an overpriced but not so much from what I’ve been told about the Tom Bihn bags.

One other one I can recommend is a company called Timbuk2. With the number two and they have
several different bags for traveling. I would say they are more technology forward than they are
travel forward but they do have several options and they are definitely worth looking into as well.

Now, when it comes to your bag itself (you’re), usually there are soft top and hard tops and I high-
ly recommend you just go ahead and get a hard top bag. If you’re going to be traveling a lot, it is
absolutely worth getting the hard top versus the soft top. I’ve always been a soft top person before
but after about five trips traveling with my soft bags, it already started showing wear and tear quite
a bit more than I was expecting for the travel that I was doing. And for that reason, I would

AE DOJO | HOW TO ORGANIZE, PACK AND TRAVEL EFFICIENTLY 7


recommend getting a hardtop. They’re built like tanks and they’re not going to be going away
anytime soon.

Now, the one that’s pictured here is the current set that’s available from Costco where if you get a
hard top it’s their bundle package. And I put that here because, for the most part, they are a fantas-
tic option. When I went and got mine, they were the Samsonite branded ones. At least the last time
I’ve checked in the Costco’s, they do not seem to be offering that package anymore. But I can say
the one that they have right now is decent. One of my co-workers has been using them for his travel
and he’s had no problems with them at all.

The second one, I would recommend is the one that I use and those are the Samsonite hardtops.
If you can get them, I’ve had no problems with them at all. And one that I’ve heard a lot of great
things about, although I do not personally use myself is the Away carry-on hard top. And it’s from a
company that built it from the ground up to be a really good carry on bag and it has a bunch of little
niceties such as a built-in integrated charger. If you need to charge your phone or your tablet, you
can actually charge it while you are rolling it down the terminal which is pretty neat. There’s also
some built-in laundry bag and zippers to make it really easy to tighten it up things like that. They
are a bit pricier than the others but again you often get what you pay for here. And I do believe they
have a 100-day warranty on them. Kind of like those online mattresses that have been populating re-
cently so you get the chance to try it. See if it’s worth it and if not, they’ll take it back no questions
asked. If you’re curious, nothing to lose for giving him a shot.

Now when we’re traveling, we want none of this, the overfilling. Nah (we’re) that’s not what we’re
about here at Asian efficiency. We’re about traveling efficiently. And one of the ways that I would
recommend to do this, would be to pick up packing cubes. You might be thinking it’s not that big of a
deal. Why do I need to get packing cubes to sort everything? I thought the same thing until I actually
traveled with packing cubes once and I tell you I’m never going back. They are absolutely worth get-
ting because they are going to make your life so much easier. Everything’s right there. Nothing shifts
arround while you’re flying. And once you arrive at your destination, you just pull your designated
cubes with the pieces you need in them and you’re done. And that’s the same when you get back.
You can use them as laundry or you can just put them back in and get started when you return again.
And no more over packing. Everything’s right there.

Now you might be wondering for clothes, “what should you get?” And often it’s going to be less than
you think. One good rule of thumb, I’ve heard and from having traveled for years now, I can agree.
Think about how much money you might need for a trip. Think about how many clothes you might
need for a trip. Now take the clothes, divide that by two. Take the money, multiply it by two. You’ll
probably still be okay and just fine with the clothes there. And if you don’t use that extra money,
extra bonus but you haven’t had to worry about trying to find where it’s going to be.

One thing to look into is “how long is your trip?” If you’re going to be staying somewhere for a lon-
ger period of time, you’re going to be able to do laundry anyway, it’s not going to be that much of a
concern because your locations are going to have laundry services available. There’s usually going to
be often laundromats in the hotels themselves. Let’s say you have a shorter trip and you only have a
small number of clothes. Well in that case, I would say your options are to either go ahead and pay

AE DOJO | HOW TO ORGANIZE, PACK AND TRAVEL EFFICIENTLY 8


the premium to have your hotel do it, see if there is an app in your location that can do pick up and
deliver of that laundry and a lot of cities that’s an option, or pack properly for the shorter travel to
get clothes that can last for that duration. If you’re wanting to pack extra carefully with only a small
number of clothes, I would recommend getting clothes that are made out of merino wool.

The big thing about merino wool clothing is that it’s warm into winter because it’s wool just like
you’d find in wool coats. But it’s also cool in the summer. It’s good at retaining your internal body
heat but it’s also good at releasing it as well because it’s it’s pretty air wicking. It’s also odor wick-
ing so you can wear the same couple of shirts over the several days and they won’t smell at all. And
they’re actually pretty clean. You don’t have to worry about them and have any concern with that.
If you do need to, they’re pretty easy to hand wash as well. With that, most of the brands you’ll
find are for regular t-shirts that you’ll find out of a bunch of different groups such as RAI and trav-
el companies like that. Now, one that I’ve used for my business trips is an upcoming company, they
had a Kickstarter a few years ago called Wool and Prince and they make merino wool shirts that are
designed to be used for business, so they make polo shirts and they make button bounce so you can
actually get these business merino wool clothing and you can use them multiple times and they’re
extremely durable. Kind of like the hard tops they’re are built like tanks.

Now, when it’s flying time. Two things I highly recommend you pick up are an eye mask and if you
don’t have them already, noise canceling headphones particularly here at Asian efficiency, we’re big
fans of the Bose QC35. But the eye mask, you might look at this photo and think she looks kind of
ridiculous. You know what? When you’re sleeping like a baby you’re not going to care how ridiculous
you look. Particularly if you’re flying in the middle of the day, there’s no guarantee, if people are
going to keep the windows open or not and maybe you just want to relax and I will say these do a
fantastic job of blocking out all the light, so you don’t have to worry about the light at all. You put it
on, you go to sleep and you’re good to go. Highly highly recommend.

For your Dopp kit. There are several different options also known as a travel bag. This is what you
would throw in your luggage. To have all your toiletries in there. One thing that can be easy to for-
get, if you don’t travel often is if you do take any medicine. Make sure you bring enough for the
number of days you’re there. This is not something that you’re going want to reduce on because you
need to take your proper medicine dose. And depending on what medicine you’re taking it’s entirely
possible that if you’re on the road and you forgot to bring it, that there is no option for you to get a
refill due to the nature of some medicine. So this is definitely something you want to make sure is on
your list, if it’s not already.

Another thing I’d recommend in there are earplugs because you’re never sure what the environment
is going to be like when you go to the hotel. This guarantees that even if you don’t have the most
quiet environment, you have this is an option.

Now there is one more I would recommend and that is purchasing a white noise machine. There are
some doctors’ offices that use these, so you can’t hear through the doors as well as it just creates a
more relaxing atmosphere and pretty much all it is, is a machine that manually creates white noise
for you. It’s kind of like if you had a box fan on but without the box fan, just creates that white
noise for you. And you can put it in any corner of the room or right by your bed if need be and it’ll

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drown out any extra noise that’s there. This thing has saved my bacon on several trips when I’ve had
loud neighbors and it’s too late for me to really consider getting a different room or anything like
that and this fully takes care of that being a headache.

All right! Now, we’re going to go ahead and get our demo setup showing OmniFocus and Editorial
working together so that you can create checklists that are reusable for travel. And I will see you on
the iPhone here in just a second.

All right! Here we are and let’s go ahead and open Editorial. Now, the file I’m going to open is go-
ing to be available as a resource and that’s this packing.taskpaper. And it’s a template that you
can utilize and tweak for what you would need for traveling. The pieces that have the brackets are
variables so you set that for like the name of the trip or how many days and we’ll use that number
when it creates the task. The app context and the app flagged, let you set which context it’s going
to begin as well as whether or not it’s a flagged task which is why it’s highlighted in red. And I hit the
gear there so that I could run the workflow and right here, I don’t have it loaded or ready and that’s
my intention. I’m going to show you how we load that. And the link to download this workflow will
be available for you as well. And at that link, you’ll click this Add Workflow to Editorial. Click open
and it’s going to add that to workflow. And now that it’s been added, we can hit the gear and click
new OmniFocus project. And it’s going to pop up here to ask us the variables. So trip, I’m just going
to put in the name of a fictional trip, in this case, how about we do, teaching checklists. Since after
all I’m teaching you checklists and let’s just make it a four-day trip. And I’m going to go ahead and
hit done. It’s going to ask to open in OmniFocus. This only happens the first time. And boom! There is
the project with the full checklist and the tasks that we set to be flagged are flagged. The Dopp kit
section is a nested project within there. And you can also delete the ones you don’t need such as the
passport or Slack’s because it’s going to be a casual trip and we’re not leaving the country. And the
last one there, that’s medicine you can set whatever you want.

Anyway, I hope this has been very useful for you and that this will save you some time in the future.
Don’t have to worry about getting those checklists done every single time now.

AE DOJO | HOW TO ORGANIZE, PACK AND TRAVEL EFFICIENTLY 10


The Day of Travel
Video 4

Hi! This is Kevin and this is module 4 of Efficient Travel, the day of travel. The time has come and
you’re about to hit the road. So here are the recommendations I would like to give you when it is
finally time for you to start that travel.

First, you should confirm all the confirmations you’ve received. In module two, I walked through
TripIt and App in the Air, and how they work together. And the only way however they can work is
that you make sure you send every one of those confirmations into TripIt so that everything can
sync. Go through and make sure you have sync everything so that you have your itinerary ready to go
and you are ready to fly that day. Otherwise, you may miss out on live updates that are integrated
through App in the Air and you would have those issues while you’re flying.

The day has come and it is time to go ahead and drive to the airport. That is if you are driving,
you’re not being dropped off, you’re not taking a taxi. And if it’s local, the cost might not be that
big for local economy parking. But if you’re going to a larger hub, that could be more of an issue
because some of them can be very very expensive for you to keep your car there for an extended
period of time. If that is the case, there are a couple of recommendations I’d have for you.

The first is I would recommend that you use a third party company for parking. Often there are
groups that can park it for a lower cost and they’ll take you straight to the airport. And that is one
option. Now, if it’s a much longer trip, and you’re having to travel a little bit to that hub, one thing
that may be worth looking into is staying at a hotel that is right by the airport. Many of them will al-
low you to use their parking lot free of charge for the duration of your trip and their shuttle will take
you straight to the airport. Just make sure if you go this route, confirmed that something that they
allow and double check that they are aware that before you travel because the last thing you want is
to come back and your car is missing because they towed it. They didn’t know that it was being kept
there.

The next, once you’re through security which if you’ve been following along hopefully you now
have PreCheck or Global Entry. So that’s going to be a much faster route to go through. However,
once you’re through, now what do you do? The best way I find to have your initial and subsequent
segments be a much better experience is to go straight to an airline lounge. And there are several
different lounges that are available. Most are of similar quality but usually, it’s a much more quiet
location in the airport, free Wi-Fi, often an open bar where you can have some drinks and snacks and
things you can have in between your flights.

Now the best way I find to get into these is to get some of the travel cards. In particular, I would
recommend the Chase Sapphire Reserve for most people because this gives you priority pass which is
a group of several different lounges in a large network. And you get access to all of them plus you’re
able to bring two guests with you. Now another option, if you travel a lot, is the American Express
Platinum card. The disadvantage here is if you’re traveling with multiple people, you only get access

AE DOJO | HOW TO ORGANIZE, PACK AND TRAVEL EFFICIENTLY 11


to the Priority Pass network for yourself. Other people do require a fee to have come with you. But
if you’re staying anywhere that is in the American Express lounge network, you can bring you and
your family for free or you and up to two guests for free. You also are able to use the Delta Sky Club
for yourself if you’re flying Delta that day. Personally for work travel, we pretty much exclusively fly
Delta. So I use the Amex card to get access to the Sky Club every time I fly and it makes things a lot
more relaxing. I actually look forward to that if I have a layover because it’s a relaxing way to re-
charge a little bit before my next flight.

The last one which is a more economic option is the Chase United Explorer. And this card gives
you two passes per year that are mailed to you. And that has the lowest annual fee of them all. Of
course, you only get two one time use passes. But one tip I’d recommend if you don’t want to go for
any of these cards is not everyone cares about having lounge access so they have that United Explor-
er card, they’ll often sell them on eBay. If you can get some great deals on those passes on eBay,
especially if they’re getting close to expiration, I found it sometimes being where they would have
those passes available maybe a month left on them and it would be ten dollars a pass which is much
cheaper than if you were to ever go to one of these lounges yourself. So that is definitely something
to look into is to getting lounge access keys on eBay.

And finally. If you’re going to be flying a whole lot particularly for business travel or you just happen
to have the travel bug hits you and you’re planning on a lot of travel in a short period of time. Try to
stick with one airline if you can. The reason being is you get those miles each time you go. Miles that
are usually only able to be given if you actually fly with that particular airline and not on reward
travel. And those are what allow you to slowly gain status. And if you are able to get that status it
makes travel much easier as time goes on as well. In particular, I have Delta silver and I’m about to
get Delta gold membership. And what those allow me is I’m able to switch to economy plus for free.
If there’s one within a certain duration of my flights and those seats that you would maybe prefer to
stay in but they charge you extra for such as close to the front but not economy or emergency exit
row seats. I don’t pay any kind of charge for those. So that is something that’s worth doing. If you’re
able to do that. And this concludes the modules and I would like to wish you luck on your efficient
travel.

AE DOJO | HOW TO ORGANIZE, PACK AND TRAVEL EFFICIENTLY 12

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