5 Ways to Adjust to A New Time Zone

I spent most of the weekend trying to plan my trip to Australia for the fall. One of the biggest pitfalls of traveling to Australia or New Zealand is that you lose almost two days traveling there. Midnight (12am) on the East Coast is 3pm in Sydney, almost 15 hours ahead.

www.worldtimezone.com 

Typically, when I travel, I am not effected by the difference in time. My body adjusts with minimal interference. That was until I traveled to Tokyo. While in Tokyo, I was fine, but when I got home my body took a week to readjust. Sleeping at 5pm and working at 1am was the norm. FYI, Tokyo is 2 hours ahead of Sydney.

A few month's ago, Men's Health had a great piece on 5 Ways to Adjust to A New Time Zone. Unfortunately, I can't find an online version. Luckily I ripped it out of the magazine.

1. Plane Time is Sleep Time

Nap as much as you can on board in both directions. Don't try to eat bad food or watch bad movies. Sit by the window so seatmates don't bother you. Use and eye mask and noise-canceling headphones. Wheels up, eyes closed.


2. Drink Up

Stay hydrated. That means no alcohol, which will only make you dehydrated and groggy and rob you of relaxing sleep. You don't want to land hungover without the bonus of having earned it with a wild night out.


3. Make the First Day Work

Assume local time immediately and fight to stay awake as long as you can.  The longer you make it, the easier the transition.


4. Step away from the bed.

If you're in your hotel and it's not close to nighttime. Never sit on the bed. If you do, you're done.


5. Return home right

Force yourself onto your normal schedule. The longer you allow yourself to stay in another time zone, the longer you miss out on life at home.


I am going to try these when I travel to Australia. Will they work? I'll report back.

Do you have any tips to beat adjustments to time?

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Saving 50,000 Club Carlson Points and Getting A Free Night!

Kelsey and I are still "massaging" our Australia itinerary that includes stop overs in Singapore and Bangkok for 23 hours each and now that we have our flights mostly routed the way we want them we have moved onto our hotels.

Right now we have:

Two nights at the Park Hyatt Sydney using our two Hyatt nights from the Hyatt visa
Two nights at the Hilton Cairns using one free weekend night from the Hilton Reserve card and 35,000 points (Great Barrier Reef Trip)
One night at the Hilton Sydney using our second free weekend night from the Hilton Reserve Card
One night at the Radisson Blu Sydney using 15,000 Club Carlson points and $115
One night at the Conrad in Singapore for 40,000 Hilton points
One night at the Sheraton Grande Sukhumvit, Bangkok for 10,000 SPG points

As I was looking at our itinerary and not really feeling good about paying for the cash and points option at the Radisson Blu Sydney I went to read Angelina's post at Just Another Points Traveler about her trip with her father to Australia. They were also staying at the Radisson Blu in Sydney but they had used the power of the Club Carlson Visa card to the fullest. If you are redeeming Club Carlson points for a reward night and need at least two (2) nights the last night on your reservation is free. So you can redeem just one night of Club Carlson points and get a second night for free! Why mess around using more points than needed and I could pull back a Hilton free weekend night certificate for another time!

So I quickly went to the Club Carlson site and put in a search for two nights and found pleanty of availability at the Radisson Blu in Sydney for 50,000 points per night. I went to book and saw a note that as long as the Club Carlson visa cardholder was on the reservation the last night would be automatically free. After booking it was confirmed that for two nights I was only deducted 50,000 points and after canceling my old reservation I even got 15,000 points back into my account for another booking later!

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Australia and Asia on Six Airlines: Booked

As you've seen in Kelsey's guest posts (here and here) booking an award trip from the United States to Australia can be one of the most difficult out there. This is one of those true cases that the earlier you can book, and the more date flexible you can be, the easier it will be for you to try and find this award.

For our trip in July we have booked our outbound on oneworld and our return is on the Star Alliance. Kelsey has become a master of the ANA tool to find Star space (I think we should become an award booking service after this trip :p). But we didn't just want to head straight home, we wanted to get some extra value from our trip if we could. Since it wasn't a round-trip we were not eligible to get a free one way out of it, but we were able to use the United rules to our advantage. We found that as long as a stop in another country was less than 24 hours we could make the routing legal without paying more miles.

So...using that logic we have added a full 23 hours in both Singapore and Bangkok with flights on AA, Qantas, Singapore, Thai and United so that our final itenirary looks like this:



 We are so excited for this trip and I hope to pick all of your miles and points brains for the best things to do and eat along the way!

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Follow us on Twitter @doit4thepoints! Have a question for us? E-mail us at chris@doitforthepoints.com or jd@doitforthepoints.com