Well, after 3 years of owning the domain, I think it’s time to get started blogging.
I turn 30 tomorrow (December 31st). Having that birthday is surprisingly quite a blessing. Beyond the rest of the world throwing me a giant party, I am able to to reflect on the past year and set goals for the next year.
This year, one of my goals is to start blogging about my life in points and miles. I got into points and miles in 2015, but I really ramped things up in 2017. I was in graduate school at the University of Alabama at the time, and my girlfriend (now wife) was living in Charlotte, NC. Given that roundtrip flights were $450 for one weekend, and I was making ~$15k per year, I needed to figure out how to go see her.
Enter points and miles.
I dove headfirst into generating massive amounts of miles, scaling up so that I was earning about 1 million miles per year in order to get to see her. While I have scaled down massively, I am still generating about 300k miles per year at least which funds our travel, and I want to be able to talk about my takes on points, miles, and the travel industry in general.
Note: I don’t work in the travel industry, so these are just my general thoughts. They could be wildly wrong…but they are my perspective.
Why the name “Professor of Points"?
Like I said earlier, I went to graduate school at the University of Alabama. When I bought the domain, I had every intention of being a research professor in psychology at a major university. COVID changed everything. I have now made my way into market research consulting, using my research and data analysis skills to help companies do better with marketing. As my friend Gary Leff at View from the Wing says, points and miles programs are the greatest marketing programs to every exist (and I would agree with that statement).
So, even though I am no longer in higher education, because I got my Ph.D., I decided to keep the name Professor of Points (I’m a professor of something!).
My goals for this blog
To be honest, I really don’t know. I hope to publish 2 or 3 times a week, but I really just want to use this as an outlet to discuss my obsession with points, miles, and travel in general. I’ll review points earning strategies, review trips I take (including how I booked them), and just general thoughts about big events in the travel industry. I can’t promise that my posts will be useful, that my WordPress usage will be any good, or that my jokes will be funny, but, to me, it’s mine.
Feel free to read what you want and ignore what you want. Leave a comment or send me an email, as I’d love to hear what you have to say.
I do have some ideas about how you can “Support the Site" (they will cost you nothing!). I’ll post once I have figured out my plan. Any and all supporting would be appreciated!
I am really excited to finally dive in and get this off the ground. I love travel, and, with a little effort, everyone has the potential to get big travel for small amounts of money.
Anyways, here’s to many adventures!
-PoP
Hey PoP! Hope you guys have been well. I’m quite intrigued after reading your debut blog. I started frequently business travel in the mid-80’s. At the height of that career in the early 2000’s I was a card carrying frequent flyer – domestic and international- with at least 5 major airlines. Same thing with hotels- tons of points. It made me crazy when I attempted to use them. They made it so hard. Most of my airline miles eventually went toward buying 1st Class upgrade “coupons”.
I’m looking forward to hearing your secrets.
All the best,
Carolyn.
Hey Carolyn! Thank you for the comment, we are doing great!
I often hear that those times were the golden age of flying. I remember calling my granny from one of those phones on the back of the seat in the 90s!
I totally get where you come from with the airline miles. While I find that hotel points are so easy to use, the airline miles are difficult! Thankfully, there’s a lot of new tools that you can use to help find those flights. I’ll be posting about my top tools for using points soon!
-PoP