Travel Trading in Torn: Your First Money Printer ✈️💸
So you hit level 15. Congrats, little crime goblin - you can fly now.
Here are some lessons I learned the hard way, and I hope that it will spare you my suffering 😅
Flying is one of the first proper ways to make steady money in Torn. The loop is simple: fly abroad, buy profitable stuff, bring it home, sell it to traders, repeat until your bank account stops looking like a crime scene.
Start Flying at Level 15
As soon as you unlock travel, start doing it. Even basic flower and plushie runs are decent early money, and they teach you the rhythm without needing much cash on hand.
But your real goal should be:
Get into a Private Island with an airstrip as soon as possible.
Save for it, rent one, borrow if you have to, sell losses, whatever. Ask around on the forums. People rent PIs for one-week or two-week periods all the time, and once you’re in one with an airstrip, you can usually make enough to pay for longer rentals pretty easily.
Basically: get the airstrip. It changes everything.
Without PI, do not put any effort into the short flights, between airport fees and lacklustre returns, it's almost never worth it.
Why the PI With Airstrip Is So Huge
Normally, you can carry 5 travel items.
A PI with an airstrip lets you carry 15 travel items.
That’s already triple the capacity, which is massive.
But the airstrip also cuts flight times by 30%. So you’re not just making 3x more per trip - your trips are also faster.
The rough profit-per-time math is:
3 ÷ 0.7 = 4.29x
So compared to flying without an airstrip, your travel profit per hour is about 4.29 times higher, or roughly a 329% increase.
That is the difference between “cute little side hustle” and “my beach house has become an illegal money printer.”
It also makes flying way easier to fit into your actual schedule. Shorter flights mean less awkward timing, less waiting around, and fewer “oh crap, I landed 40 minutes ago” moments.
In practice that means that PI rental + upkeep maxes out at about ~1.3-1.4m, something you will be making in one trip to UAE or China, while keeping the 5k happiness benefit on top, and space for more trips.
Use Torn Travel. Seriously.
Use this:
And if you’re playing even semi-actively, use it with the paid subscription.
The whole trick with travel profit is landing when the item you want is actually in stock. The good stuff gets drained fast, especially in high-profit locations.
With the subscription on and “respect abroad stock” checked, Torn Travel helps time your trips so you land when the profitable items should still be available.
That timing is the difference between “nice, free money” and “I flew to UAE and came home with emotional damage.”
It comes with a free trial, you will love it after. Oddly no, I am not being paid for promoting it 😂
Can You Just Fly Blind?
Yeah, you can.
But especially for places like UAE and China, even flowers and plushies can get drained fast. If you land and the good stuff is gone, you end up buying some sad backup item that cuts your profit by half or worse.
Not ideal. Not cute. Very broke-coded.
Suitcases
Get the small suitcase as soon as possible.
It gives you 2 extra slots, which can mean 100k+ extra profit per flight, and it costs around 1m. You usually make that back in ten trips or less.
The medium and large suitcases are nice, but don’t rush them unless you have spare cash. Even if you fly a lot, the large suitcase can take around 28 days of frequent flying to break even. Early on, that money is often better used for higher-margin goods or just keeping your trading cash moving.
Small suitcase: yes, ASAP.
Medium and large: nice later, but don’t bankrupt yourself trying to look fancy.
What Should You Buy?
Flowers and plushies are the classic starting point. They’re cheap, easy, and you don’t need to carry much money.
But the more cash you risk, the more you can make.
Once you’ve got the timing down, you can move into higher-margin goods. For example, switching from flowers or plushies to something like scales might require carrying around 2.5m, but it can push your return from roughly 850k per trip to about 1.3m per trip.
That’s a big difference.
Just remember the golden rule:
Be ready when you land.
Be on your phone or computer just before arrival. Land, buy instantly, fly back instantly.
Do not stand around abroad like a lost tourist with pockets full of cash.
Your safe grace period does not last forever. If you sit there too long, you’re probably getting mugged. The mugging is annoying, sure, but the real problem is hospital time. It can wreck your timing and turn the whole trip into basically nothing.
Speed is safety.
Safety is profit.
Profit is freedom.
Very dramatic, but also true.
Selling: Use Traders, Not the Market
Most of the time, sell to traders instead of dumping everything on the market.
Use Torn Exchange to find buyers:
https://tornexchange.com/listings
Search the item you’re selling, compare prices, and sell to whoever gives the best margin.
Don’t get lazy here. A small difference per item adds up very quickly when you’re flying all the time.
Final Bit
Travel trading is one of the cleanest early money engines in Torn. Start flying at 15, get into a PI with an airstrip as soon as you can, use Torn Travel properly, buy smart, sell to traders, and keep your trips tight.
Do it right and your PI stops being a luxury flex.
It becomes a giant tropical money cannon.
Enjoy the profits, enjoy the financial freedom.
And happy Pride - be gay, do crimes! 😈💰🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈
And if this helped you, press the 👍