Travel for free

by Phil Houseal, published in the Community Journal (Kerrville TX) Sept 24, 2008

Growing up in a small Kansas town, Gina Henry-Cook yearned to see the big, wide world. In her words, she was "smitten with travel."

Since she hadn't won any lotteries, Henry-Cook tried to come up with ways to support her travel habit. She earned a masters degree in international management, so she used that experience to catalog ways to travel for free. She began sharing her tips with friends. Eventually she came up with 40, which she refined into her seminar and a book "Free Vacations & Make Money Traveling."

I asked her to give us a sample of what we will discover in her class.

"Just pick three favorite ideas from this class and those will pay for your vacation," she stated.

She gave her top three:

1) How to maximize frequent flier miles using a credit card, so you can fly for free

2) How to put together a small tour that will let you travel free

3) How to earn a free cruise by putting together a class to teach aboard ship

She also shares ways to make money closer to home by becoming a mystery shopper for the retail, banking, and travel industries. Students learn how to choose the best-paying assignments, how to import items that will pay for the vacation, how to fly as a courier, how to get on as a tour guide, how to write articles and take pictures, and how to teach language classes for free travel.

She has dozens more ideas, all crammed into the three-hour session. "I like talking, so it's a high content three hours," she said, adding that she takes questions and sends participants home with all the contact information they'll need to start traveling for free.

These days, Henry-Cook has come a long, long way from Kansas. She has traveled to more than 80 countries and 40 states. Every year she leads 100 seminars in 86 cities across the country. Former students contact her all the time with new tales of how they used her ideas to see the world.

"It's all possible, it's all practical," she said. "Anyone can do it."

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Gina Henry-Cook will teach the class "Free Vacations & Make Money Traveling" on Wednesday evening, Oct 1. To learn more about this and hundreds of other lifelong learning classes, call 830-895-4386, or visit www.clubed.net.

Club Ed is the Community Education program of the Kerrville Independent School District.

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