Discussing Travel Hacks with Sam Zia of Travel Smarter Consulting

Sam Zia was 13 when he decided business class couldn’t possibly cost what the airlines were charging for it.

His family flew to Europe every year, drawn back to London where they’d once lived, and the economy was doing what economy does when you’re a kid starting to outgrow it. Tight seats, long queues, and the dawning awareness that the people a few rows forward were having a substantially different experience. “It can’t be that every single person in business class is spending $10,000 to sit there,” he thought.

He went looking for the answer. The business class cabin turned out to be full of people who had figured out a different way in. Most of them had done it through credit card points and airline partnerships that the average traveler never bothers to learn.

That gap between what travel could cost and what most people actually pay is the business Zia built. He founded Travel Smarter Consulting in Washington, D.C., at 18 in 2020. The firm books business and first-class travel for clients ranging from Capitol Hill offices to Silicon Valley firms to NGOs, and works on credit card strategies for individuals and organizations who want to get more from the money they are already spending. In most cases, the consulting fee plus the ticket comes out below what clients would have paid on their own. The value is knowing where the system has room that most people never find.

Why Sam Zia Says Your Airline Credit Card Might Be the Wrong Card

The most common mistake Zia sees from new clients is a simple one: most people have an airline-branded credit card and assume that’s the sensible choice. If you fly Delta, you get a Delta card. If you fly American, you get an American card. The logic seems sound until you understand what you’re giving up.

“If you’re only earning points with one airline, you then are stuck with that airline,” he said, “even if a partner of that airline has a better fare through their loyalty program.” The card that feels like loyalty is often the one closing off the most options.

The better approach, in Zia’s view, is building flexibility from the start. Bank-issued cards from Chase, American Express, and Capital One earn points that can be transferred to multiple airline programs at a 1:1 ratio. That range matters because the most valuable business class redemption for any given trip is often not available through the airline you’re actually flying. It lives in that airline’s partner programs, where award charts can be substantially cheaper and availability easier to find.

“You want to be earning ideally points which you can transfer to a number of airlines,” Zia said, “and that typically involves having a bank card, paradoxically.” Most people assume airline loyalty means an airline card. Zia’s argument is that the most loyal thing you can do for your future travel is stay uncommitted to any single carrier.

The partner redemption advantage is measurable. A one-way business class seat from the U.S. East Coast to Madrid can be booked for 40,500 Iberia Club Avios on off-peak dates, according to The Points Guy. Avios are transferable at a 1:1 ratio from six major bank programs. Air France-KLM’s Flying Blue runs monthly promo fares as low as 45,000 miles in business class from Washington, D.C. to Europe. Japan Airlines business class to Tokyo is bookable for 60,000 American Airlines AAdvantage miles through the partner award chart, versus 98,000 or more for equivalent American-operated alternatives.

The alternative to knowing any of this is redeeming through a bank’s travel portal, which returns roughly 1 to 1.5 cents per point. Transferred to the right airline program for a premium cabin, those same points can return 5 to 10 cents each. On a transatlantic business class seat, that’s the difference between using 30,000 points and using 200,000.

How Travel Smarter Consulting Thinks About Redemption Timing

Earning flexibility is half the equation. The other half is timing.

Zia identifies two failure modes that are roughly mirror images of each other. “You ideally want to be careful about how you spend your miles,” he said. “You don’t want to hoard them and you also don’t want to redeem all of them as quickly as possible.” Both extremes cost people money, and both are common.

The hoarding problem is larger than most people realize. Americans earned $47 billion in credit card rewards in 2024, according to The Motley Fool’s analysis of CFPB data. Of that total, roughly $4 billion went unredeemed and expired. Those are points that took real spending to accumulate. They sat idle long enough to be worth nothing.

The miles that sat in an account for seven years because the owner was waiting for “the right trip” often lost value as programs devalued their award charts, or disappeared entirely when they expired. Sitting on a large balance while a program quietly makes its redemptions more expensive is a slow way to lose value without noticing.

The opposite mistake is burning miles impulsively on low-value redemptions. Portal redemptions return a fraction of what a well-timed transfer to a premium cabin would produce. Knowing which redemptions are worth waiting for, and which programs are likely to devalue, is where much of the expertise sits. The question Zia is usually helping clients answer is not whether to use their miles, but when and where the math actually works.

Airline Product Knowledge: What Sam Zia of Travel Smarter Consulting Tracks

TSC’s edge isn’t just knowing where to find the right award rate. It extends to knowing what the plane is actually like once you’re on it, a different kind of knowledge and one that takes time to build.

Business class cabins vary considerably across airlines and even across aircraft types within the same carrier. Seat configuration, meal quality, entertainment systems, and wifi all differ. For clients who plan to work during a transatlantic flight, the differences aren’t trivial.

“Even details which may seem sort of prosaic and mundane like type of wifi,” Zia said, “as a result of how much I travel, I could tell you, well, this airline on this aircraft has very slow wifi. So if you need to work on the plane, I would avoid that while this airline has very fast wifi.” A client who books based on points value alone and ends up on a flight with unusable internet for eight hours has optimized for the wrong thing.

TSC’s focus destinations include African safaris, Argentina, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Sri Lanka. Zia has traveled to each of them personally. The goal is firsthand knowledge of what the experience actually delivers, rather than relying on descriptions that look similar on paper regardless of how different the actual trips are.

He’s also explicit about what TSC doesn’t do. “We are not mileage brokers,” he said. “There are some companies which just sell other people’s miles and that is the base of what they do. That is not what we do.” TSC’s value comes from knowing how to navigate the systems that already exist. The best rates are found within programs clients already hold or can access.

Sam Zia on Who Can Benefit from Travel Hacking

The prevailing mental model of loyalty program optimization involves a specific kind of traveler: someone who logs hundreds of thousands of miles per year on a single carrier, achieves elite status through sheer volume, and lives out of airports and hotel lounges. Zia says that picture is mostly wrong for how modern points programs actually work, and it keeps a lot of people from engaging with a system that would benefit them.

“You don’t need to have a job that sends you around the world every month in order to be earning miles,” he said. “You can be earning miles even if you are a normal person with a normal job and actually many of our clients do it that way.”

The mechanism is credit card spending, not flight volume. Most of the earning in modern loyalty programs happens at the grocery store, at restaurants, on utility bills. The right card structure, matched to where a client actually spends, determines how quickly points accumulate.

Some cards give multiplied returns on specific spending categories. Dining, travel, office supplies, and advertising are common ones. Matching card choice to actual spending patterns is where most of the optimization happens, and it requires knowing how those category structures vary across programs.

“The optimal way of maximizing credit card rewards is dependent on individual or company-specific circumstances,” Zia said. “That’s what we try and help unlock.”

For organizations, including small firms, nonprofits, and advocacy offices, the opportunity is often larger than for individuals simply because the spending volume is higher and the optimization is almost never being done systematically. Most arrive with a single card and a vague awareness that they’re earning something, without having thought through what they want the miles to do. A year of unoptimized corporate card spending on a team of ten can represent a large pool of unredeemed points that could have covered premium cabin travel for leadership. The math usually surprises people.

How Working with Travel Smarter Consulting Works

TSC operates as a boutique firm, and that scale is part of what it offers. Larger luxury travel agencies carry overhead that shows up in their pricing: markups on trip value, packages that don’t flex much around specific client preferences, and sometimes preferred relationships with particular hotel brands that shape recommendations regardless of fit.

“Because we’re a boutique company, we really try and tailor trips based on a client’s particular desires and ideas for their trip,” Zia said. “We tend to keep costs lower and offer a more personalized experience.” The boutique structure keeps the incentives aligned with the client rather than with whoever is paying the agency to move volume.

Initial consultations are free. No contracts are required. The business model is built on clients choosing to continue after they’ve had a chance to evaluate what the engagement actually delivers.

What started as a 13-year-old’s suspicion that business class was more accessible than it appeared has grown into a practice built around proving that consistently. The specific tools change as programs update and airlines shift their award charts. The underlying insight doesn’t: most travelers leave a gap between what their spending could produce and what it actually does, and closing that gap takes less expertise than most people assume. It mostly takes knowing where to look.