One question, answered properly

Why this site is so narrow

I have run travel businesses since 2017. My main site, Global Viewpoint, covers 73 countries across five continents. It is broad by design, and being broad worked for a long time.

It stopped working for flights, and the reason is not really about search. Airfare is a different discipline from the rest of travel writing. Doing it properly means collecting the fares yourself, pricing carriers against each other on the same dates, and going back to re-check it every month. That is not something you do in between hotel reviews, and a page that treats it as a sideline reads like one.

So this site does one thing. Every page here is about getting from the United States to Europe, or moving between European cities once you are there. There are no hotel reviews, no packing lists, no things to do. If you want those, they live on Global Viewpoint and Alps by Design, and I will link you there when it helps.

Who is writing

I am Jon Miksis. Over nine years as a travel blogger I have taken more than 250 flights, and I booked and paid for every single one of them myself. Nobody handed me a press ticket and asked for a review. That is the whole basis for this site: I have made the exact decision you are about to make, with my own money, several hundred times.

The specific thing I can do, and the reason this site exists, is that I regularly fly from Boston to Europe for under $300 round trip. Not once, as a fluke I could write a viral post about. Regularly, using deal alerts, award charts, and a stack of travel rewards cards, which is the same method laid out across these guides. I have also flown business class to Europe many times on leading US and European carriers, almost always on points rather than cash, because the arithmetic on a paid business fare across the Atlantic almost never works.

I am not a luxury traveler, and this is not a luxury site. I am a value traveler. I have flown Qsuites and I have flown Wizz Air, and I would do both again for the right trip. Some of the most interesting places in Europe are simply not served by good airlines, and I am not going to skip them to protect a self-image. What I care about is getting to the interesting place at a fare that makes sense, and knowing exactly what I gave up to do it.

That is also why the cheap gateways get real coverage here. I have routed through Reykjavík for years, first on WOW Air and now regularly on Icelandair, and I have flown via Ponta Delgada, Madeira, and London specifically to bring a fare down. Those routings are not free: they cost you time, and sometimes a separate ticket and the risk that comes with it. The useful question is when that trade is worth taking, and that is a question you can only answer honestly if you have actually done it badly a few times.

I live in Boston, which matters more than it sounds. Boston is one of the best-connected transatlantic departure cities in the country, and it is where most of my own crossings start. Boston is genuinely one of the two best airports in North America for direct transatlantic deals, alongside New York, and that is not a hometown opinion, it is why the fares are what they are. When I write that a fare out of BOS is good, or that a particular routing is worth the connection, that is not desk research. It is the airport I actually fly from.

Europe is not an assignment for me either. I spend two to three months a year there. My wife is Austrian, I speak German and Spanish, I studied in Barcelona in 2014, and Switzerland is my favorite country on earth. I have been to Iceland more than ten times, which is how I got opinionated about Keflavík as a gateway.

My degree is in finance, from Bentley. That is more relevant than it sounds, because most of what this site does is arithmetic people would rather not do: what a point is actually worth, what a surcharge does to a redemption, whether a cheaper fare into a different airport survives the cost of the connection. Run properly, that arithmetic saves me somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 a year on airfare, using deal alerts, award charts, and a stack of travel rewards cards. The point of this site is to hand you the same method.

I also host The World Between Us, and I founded Alps by Design, which does for the Alps what this site does for the flight.

What I will not do

I will not tell you I have flown something I have not. Every cabin review here is labeled either Flown or Researched, and the label means exactly what it says: Flown means I sat in that airline’s that cabin on a Europe route. Researched means I read everything available and talked to people who had, and I am telling you so.

I will not quote a fare without telling you when it was seen. Airfare from six months ago is not data, it is decoration. Every fare range on this site carries the month and year it was observed and where it came from.

And I will not recommend something because it pays better. The review method and the affiliate policy are both published, so you can check.

The other sites

I own several travel sites and I would rather say so than have you work it out. Where one is genuinely the better answer to your question, I link to it. There are no automatic sitewide links between them.

• Global Viewpoint — The flagship destination site: where to go and what to do once you land.
• Alps by Design — Trip planning for the Alps, the natural next step after you book the flight.
• Inspire Retreats — Small-group retreats.
• AI Hustle Guy — Tools and workflow for online businesses.