In the years since he joined the Minnesota-based Thrifty Traveler in 2018, Kyle Potter and his colleagues have talked about launching a podcast that, like the website, shares tips about saving money on travels. They finally launched it in March 2025 and, earlier this month, they won a Shorty Award, an international competition honoring the best work across digital and social platforms.

“I didn’t have that on my bingo card in 2026, if ever,” said Potter, who previously spent half a decade covering politics at the state Capitol in St. Paul for the Associated Press. “The Shorty Awards are a big name in the podcasting industry, so the idea of even submitting for it, let alone winning, was not within any of my realms of possibility.”

In another first, Potter and his co-host Gunnar Olson will host a live recording of their podcast at 7 p.m. June 12 at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis (theparkwaytheater.com).

“We’re now somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 80 episodes, so the idea of talking in front of 200-plus people about travel is a little bit different than doing it in our relatively small studio in our office. But, yeah, I don’t know that I thought about that part of it, either. That’s a future me problem,” Potter said.

Jared Kamrowski founded the company in 2015. A certified public accountant, Kamrowski was traveling 100 nights a year and got to know the ins and outs of airline, hotel and credit card rewards programs. He started sharing his tips online and was able to make it his full-time job two years later. Today, Thrifty Traveler employs 26 people, more than half of whom live in Minnesota.

Potter said the whole goal behind Thrifty Traveler is to help show people how to travel more for less.

“That’s what we’ve always done, sending out email alerts for good flight deals and writing online,” he said. “We have really prided ourselves on meeting people where they’re at, helping people connect the dots and explaining things clearly, so that you know this outrageously complex and needlessly frustrating world of travel and finding better deals is approachable.”

Why is travel so difficult?

“In some ways, I think it is intentionally complex and opaque, and that makes our job so much more important,” Potter said. “I used to joke when I first started here that my old day job was rooted in the fact that there are important things happening in the world that powerful people don’t want you to know. But there are also important things happening out there in the travel world that people in power don’t want you to know. Travel is truly important and can be life changing, whether you’re going to a new country for the first time, taking time off to reset or reconnecting with members of your family.”

Budget travel is a hot topic these days, with surging oil prices and the closure of Spirit Airlines. Potter compared it to the early days of the pandemic, when travel and nearly everything else ground to a halt. But he said people still wanted to plan trips. Maybe not in June 2020, but maybe October 2020 or June 2021.

Airfare has gotten more expensive and Potter expects prices are going to stay higher for the immediate future. Airlines have been absorbing some higher costs, but the cost of filling up planes with fuel has doubled in the last few months and it will take time for the companies to recoup that cost.

But thanks to supply and demand and competition between the airlines, there are still deals to be found.

“There are always going to be instances when, for example, American Airlines looks at Minneapolis and the prices of flights to Europe. Then they’ll say, ‘We can really stick it to Delta with some fares that are in the $400 (range) instead of $800 round trip to Amsterdam or Paris. We’re going to try and steal some of those customers away.’

“That kind of thing is still happening every single day. I mean, that’s why we have a team of a dozen people whose only job is to look for those deals and send them to our members. Those things are going to continue happening. It hasn’t stopped. It’s just gotten a little less frequent than it was, you know, at the beginning of the year, and certainly than any of us would like.”

When asked for basic tips on booking a flight, Potter had two answers. The first is a recent Thrifty Traveler podcast dubbed “Cheap flights are still out there — How to find them,” where the pair spent 50 minutes discussing that very topic. The second is something of a mantra in the company.

“The most important thing for cheap travel in good times, and especially in bad, is flexibility,” Potter said. “The more flexible that you can be, the more chances you’re going to give yourself to get a better deal. Now, flexibility can be as simple as instead of leaving on a Monday and returning on a Monday, you leave on a Tuesday and return on a Tuesday, or maybe return on a Saturday.

“These one- or two-day changes can result in you getting families on the exact same flight for $100, $200 or $300 less. If you’re talking about a big trip abroad, it can be $500-plus in savings, just by that little bit of flexibility. Flexibility is also just traveling at different times of year. If you can travel in mid- to late-August instead of earlier in the summer, prices almost always come down.”