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Airlines crack down on ‘mileage runs’
- themartorana 12y agoThe House doesn't like to be gamed. It's no different than a casino in Vegas - if you figure out how to beat The House, they change the rules (or the direction your knees bend). If it feels like you're getting a deal, that hole will eventually be closed.
- chasing 12y agoIt's almost like these companies offering you products and services are trying to make money.
- roastbeefsc 12y agoThere's a difference between making a profit and maximizing it at the expense of everything else (e.g. employee wages, public social safety nets). Wal-Mart employees utilizing $6.2 billion dollars of public assistance is an example of this. This isn't as an egregious example as Wal-Mart but it's indicative of the same underlying force.
- crusso 12y agoThere's a difference between making a profit and maximizing it at the expense of everything else They're aligning rewards for their loyalty program with the behaviors of customers not trying to game the system. And you criticize this? Wal-Mart employees utilizing $6.2 billion dollars of public assistance is an example of this. And exactly upon whom do you place the blame for unemployed people who use public assistance? How much credit does Wal-Mart get for the delta increase of public assistance that would be spent if they didn't employee people?
- fennecfoxen 12y agoWhat?? Even if one accepts the tendentious leftist screed for the purposes of argument (which I will do here), this isn't even remotely like Wal-Mart. The traditional Wal-Mart complaints are that they don't pay employees enough or that they compete with other businesses too effectively. (Occasionally, the complaint is that they are willing to pay suppliers too little.) This airline complaint is that customers who have been explicitly trying to game the system by doing things like purchase $500 airline tickets can't get the free trips or upgrades they want as readily as they could before. It cheapens your anti-Walmart rhetoric to put this in the same class of "oppression". Why would you do such a thing?
- grecy 12y agoThis reminds me of my buddies beating a casino. It goes like this: Play roulette, start with a low bet ($5) on black or white (50/50). If you win, you've profited the amount of the original bet. If you lose, double your bet and play again. Repeat until you win and you will have profited the amount of the original bet. Repeat. This works so long as you have enough cash to keep doubling the bet. Hitting the maximum allowed bet on the table is not a problem, you just split it in half and keep going. My buddies at one point had ~$60k on the table, and didn't have enough to go to ~$120k if they lost... They did this for about two weeks straight, profiting something like $10k. One morning when they tried to enter the casino, the guards at the door said they were not welcome, and if they didn't leave immediately the police would be called. They assume they had been spotted on camera, or the table operator reported them.
- CyrusL 12y agoThis is called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%29
- grecy 12y agoThanks, I just found that. Interesting they say that casino betting limits eliminate the strategy. I don't think that's true. Let's say you have $100k on the table, which is the maximum allowed, and you lose. All you need to is play multiple tables with the doubled bet ($200k) split up across those tables. Once you've played all of those to conclusion (maybe even splitting again...) you will have effectively "won" the line of play that they tried to stop you when you hit the $100k limit.
- notahacker 12y agoBetting $100,000 on two tables has a lower probability of returning $400,000 than betting $200,000 on one table. Also a lower probability of returning zero, but winning one of those bets and losing the other doesn't help. Needing to win two independent (consecutive or simultaneous) negative-EV bets to beat a losing streak of a certain length increases the probability that combination of events won't happen, and if you lose both bets at the table limit (which is slightly more probable than winning both) you'll need to spread your bets across even more tables and hope even more independent events fall in your favour.
- personZ 12y agoAir miles (along with many loyalty type programs that primarily benefit corporate travelers) exists as a form of kickback, encouraging employees to spend their employer's money prolifically, and to short circuit normal best-value evaluations, in order to earn personal miles. Some employers prohibit this, or demand that the miles go towards the company or whatever, but many more do not encouraging people to take countless unjustified or unnecessary flights and hotel stays purely to rack up personal benefits that they can use to their own benefit.
- prostoalex 12y agoMost companies would require the use of a corporate travel planner to combat this. My most recent employers happened to both use Concur, and the UI there typically requires a written note any time you're booking something that's not the cheapest fare.
- checker 12y agoAt least there's the option of booking something "more expensive". Some places require that employees book the cheapest fare no matter what. Then you get situations like an employee making 150K/yr sacrificing an entire work day traveling in order to save the $50 more it costs to fly direct or out of a closer airport. The hidden costs aren't taken into account at all, but I guess it might be easier to enforce a blanket policy.
- potatolicious 12y agoIn my experience it's rare to see a ruleset as hard as "absolute cheapest, no exceptions" - generally what I see is "must be within percentage of absolute lowest price". Even within these restrictions loyalty programs still make sense - these are people who purchase a large amount of travel per year, if you can guarantee yourself as an exclusive supplier you still come out ahead - even with price ceilings.
- wozniacki 12y agoI've always been intrigued by the idea of various marketplaces of financial activity, likened to houses of gambling. Someone well versed in stock exchanges, commodity exchanges, currency exchanges, insurance exchanges, rare metal / mineral exchanges etc. can chime in: What is a good "house" (a marketplace for goods and/or financial instruments) that does not change the rules - or changes them very rarely - and has generally stood the test of time? Can currency markets be gamed - by governments or other control bodies - so that a repeat of the Black Wednesday[1] is all but minimized? I am really interested in how financial markets deal with these kinds of quandaries, where a Soros[2] like figure could potentially manipulate an event to his favor. If they put in place too many fail-safe mechanisms, 'players' may be turned away and may want to 'gamble' at another house. Too few, then the 'house' gets taken to the cleaners. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#Currency_speculation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Soros#Currency_speculati... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
- x1798DE 12y agoHardly sounds like a "crack down", more like closing a loophole. And, frankly, it seems like a loophole that needs closing - the airlines were essentially paying people to take longer flights.
- LandoCalrissian 12y agoThat's kind of a bummer. I have read about some of these tricks before. It's not something I would personally do since sitting on a plane for an entire weekend just to get points sounds like a special kind of torture. Yet it was nice knowing that there were people out there willing to do it just to game the system.
- markpundmann 12y agoClassic case of Adverse Selection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection
- idlewords 12y agoI always liked that the reward for mileage runs was... getting to fly some more!
- davidw 12y agoShudder - you'd have to pay me more than $500 to spend a weekend on an airplane. It's very tiring holding the things up by the armrests :-/
- willis77 12y agoIf you are 25 years old, this is how many weekends you have left in your life (on average): https://i.imgur.com/MA3YeuX.jpg https://i.imgur.com/MA3YeuX.jpg Let's spend one on a plane so that we can make it into the gold lounge and get free yogurt-covered raisons!
- irremediable 12y agoDamn, that's a daunting graphic! I wonder if there's a line/area perception thing going on there.
- Osmium 12y agoLet's hope so. I suppose it makes sense if a single line is a year.
- ggreer 12y agoIt seems worse than it is. The human visual system isn't counting every dot. It's just a texture to us. Each dot is 6 pixels wide, making it 52 x 52 = 2704 weeks (making each row a year). You could get the number of days remaining by expanding this image about 2.6x along both axes.
- brandonmenc 12y agoI'll gladly trade a single weekend for ~2 years of priority boarding and automatic first class upgrades.
- potatolicious 12y agoIt's ~1 year of priority boarding and automatic first class upgrades (you have to re-qualify yearly), and it's several weekends at the very least - there is no way you can hit 50K miles in a single weekend. You're looking at spending 5-10% of all of your weekends in a plane to maintain this status.
- IgorPartola 12y agoI don't get it. What does an elite status really buy you? If I had to fly somewhere and had an extra $500+ for an extra "miles run" I sure as hell would find a more entertaining way to spend it than to take an entire weekend to fly around. How many of these runs would you have to do to justify it, and is it worth it? Edit: I should ask it this way: how much do you have to pay directly to get all the perks Elite status gives you? Can you buy Elite status for $500? $1,500? This is as opposed to how much do you have to spend on extra tickets you don't need to get the upgrades? Basically, I assume that it's cheaper to buy extra tickets and fly around, than to buy the status directly (otherwise people wouldn't do it). The question is how much cheaper is it?
- el_benhameen 12y agoI wouldn't spend a weekend for that payoff either. Having said that, I just did a round trip from LAX to Istanbul with the outward trip in business/first and the return in economy, and I would absolutely jump through some hoops to get the more comfortable option if I was flying long-haul more often. Bed-seats and free scotch are no joke on an 18-hour trip.
- Igglyboo 12y agoLooks like you get waived fees and free upgrades to first class or similar. http://www.delta.com/content/www/en_US/skymiles/about-skymiles/medallion-program/medallion-benefits.html http://www.delta.com/content/www/en_US/skymiles/about-skymil...
- ewang1 12y agoI agree... Elite status doesn't really get you much these days, except for lounge access and the ability to cut lines. But you can just spend the $500/yr on an AMEX card and get the lounge access.
- LandoCalrissian 12y agoIt really depends on the offer and the perks. Like the example in the article the guy got a $700 ticket to Singapore and then got enough miles from it for a business class ticket to Europe. So he easily saved money, maybe even in the low thousands. I think the value is there, but you have to be willing to take a plane to nowhere and burn entire weekends just to get it. I certainly don't think that's worth it, but there are a lot of people that do.
- adnam 12y agoThis is sadder than sad
- driverdan 12y agoThis is a shortsighted mistake that is costing airlines something very important: loyalty. Anyone who frequents FlyerTalk or other airline related sites knows that frequent flyers are switching away from the devalued and decoupled miles airlines because of the changes. Cracking down on milage runs is one thing. It makes sense for airlines to price flights according to their value (including rewards value). But tying rewards to spending instead of miles is a mistake. Many people like myself will just move to airlines who still reward their travelers well.
- apendleton 12y agoTwo things: firstly, the analysis I've seen suggests that some kinds of business travels lose and some gain, depending on the travel patterns -- in particular, frequent short-duration flyers (e.g., people who commute from DC to NYC twice a week) gain, while infrequent long-distance travelers (e.g., people racking up miles going NYC to Shanghai a few times a year) lose. So maybe the airlines think they'll one class of traveler for every one of another class that they lose? Secondly, the overarching assumption is that American (and its alliance) will follow the other major players and switch once the merger is done, at which point there won't really be anywhere to go, at least for people mostly traveling domestically in the US. They control the market.
- jrapdx3 12y agoIt does seem loyalty to an airline would decline if not rewarded. Recent changes reduce the reward and likely undermine loyalty. But how much do carriers care at this point? Two factors likely contribute to policy decisions of the airlines. Mergers produce less competition, and secondly, it's quite noticeable over the last couple of years that every flight is packed full. Consequently, a shortage of seats assures carrier income which makes loyalty much less relevant, in particular loyalty that's tightly linked to miles traveled. OTOH loyalty programs connected to credit cards are probably more profitable to airlines, and in today's world more effective in maintaining loyalty too.
- mef 12y agoAvid mileage runner here. It does seem like the end of an era, though there are still some smaller loopholes available to be exploited for cheap status. For example, for Star Alliance flyers, until recently (yesterday in fact) you could achieve Star Alliance Gold status (priority check in and boarding, free checked bags, first to be upgraded, last to be bumped, lounge access, etc) for cheap by registering for Aegean Airlines' loyalty program as they only required 20k miles to achieve Gold status whereas most other Star Alliance partners require 50k. You could also keep this status for 3 years as long as you logged some miles each year (other airlines require you make the 50k level every year.) Yesterday Aegean too announced revisions to their loyalty program which pretty much put an end to this. But there are still other loopholes in other airlines' programs being rooted out by the dedicated.
- vpontis 12y agoWhere do you go to find these loopholes? Or is it just a lot of individual research?
- SeoxyS 12y agoThe trick I've used to get Star Alliance Gold really fast is to hop up using status match challenges. Find any non-Star-Alliance airline where you can get silver status easily; and email premiermatch@united.com. They'll probably give you gold status immediately, and you have 3 months to fly 12,500 miles to secure it through the following year. FoundersCard right now has the benefit of instant silver status on Cathay Pacific (OneWorld), no need for any flying. (Email me if you're interesting in a referral link.) Using this method, the only cost to getting gold status is (1) FoundersCard membership dues (easily pays for itself with other discounts), and (2) a round-trip to Europe or Asia, plus maybe a domestic flight to round up the miles earned.
- redblacktree 12y agoDo you have to actually take the flight, or is buying the ticket enough?
- rjbrock 12y agoYou have to actually take the flight. Points aren't awarded unless you have checked in and flown
- mherdeg 12y agoModern "mileage runs" require the travel to actually be completed. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, people used to go on "baht runs", buying a cheap Thai Airways airpass that allowed many segments of intra-Thailand travel for a very low price, and earning many "qualifying segments" on TG's partner carriers, allowing people to make top-tier United status for under $1000 (by getting 100+ qualifying segments). There were reports that some people didn't actually fly the trips (e.g. supposedly some people paid locals to board with their boarding passes). These days, like the "pudding guy" and the "buying Treasury bonds with credit cards" and the "dollar coins", are over.
- LandoCalrissian 12y agoI remember reading a story where a guy was paying people in some Asian country to take flights for him so he could get miles. I recall it working out for him.
- rjbrock 12y agoThey are missing a huge point when it comes to Mileage runs. The majority of people doing mileage runs are not trying to earn miles to spend, they are doing it in order to make the next level of status. For United the benefits of 1k might be much greater than Platinum (the next level down), so if you are only 5 to 10k miles away you would do a mileage run. The article also fails to mention that United has not changed the way you earn status. It is still miles traveled and mileage runs (assuming you have spent enough during the year) are still viable
- personZ 12y agoThat -- the quest for the next level of status -- is exactly what the article focuses on, so they didn't really miss it. And it explicitly mentions that the status levels now require a minimum spend in addition to a minimum of miles.
- apendleton 12y agoMileage runs for status on United have gotten more complicated, though, because you have to work towards both your mileage total and your spending total, and while partner trips count towards both, only trips on United planes or United tickets count towards the latter. This means you either have a much more restricted set of possible mileage run flights, or the average CPM of your non-mileage-run flights has to be higher.
- shittyanalogy 12y agoI would love to see a study of whether it is more cost effective to be loyal to an airline and collect miles or to just always buy the cheapest flight. I imagine that the occasional free flight on non-blackout dates doesn't make up the cost difference of always choosing the cheapest flight but I have no data to back it up.
- idlewords 12y agoIf you just want to maximize travel for your dollar, it may not be cost-effective to chase miles. But a lot of people collect miles so they can enjoy perks (like hotel suites or first/business class travel) that would otherwise be completely out of reach.
- panarky 12y agoYes, I'd love to see evidence one way or the other. I've had endless hassles converting miles to flights. It always seems that there are no seats available for mileage redemption for the routes and times I want to fly. So I've concluded miles are worth a lot less than cash. I now buy the cheapest ticket regardless of carrier and use a cash back credit card. No more miles, no more loyalty. If your time has value, and if you're spending your own money (not your employer's), is it worth the effort to juggle all the programs, deals, miles and terms? Or is cash the better option?
- saryant 12y agoWhen I was flying weekly as a consultant, I was loyal to United. I was only in the job for six months but in that time I racked up about 150k United miles. I redeemed them for a first-class ticket on Lufthansa from Denver to Berlin and Zurich. I also churn credit cards for the miles and hotel points. Next month I'm flying to Tokyo, Taipei and Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific and Japan Airlines in first class and Eva Air in business, staying at the Park Hyatt Tokyo and Conrad Hong Kong. Then in January I'm flying to Vietnam, again in first class on Cathay and JAL, with free stops in Hong Kong, Beijing and Tokyo.
- hoverkraft 12y agoCollecting miles isn't necessarily focused on earning free flights. The tiered statuses offered by most airlines include a variety of other perks that can make them attractive, and that couldn't readily be achieved via lowest-bidder flying: dedicated lines at airport security, advance boarding, free upgrades, free bags, waived fees, greater flexibility to change a ticket, dedicated customer support numbers, etc. While some of these can be purchased as one-offs, the cost of doing so would probably offset the "cheapest flight" approach, and the convenience of receiving them automatically has some value on its own. The cost/benefit might still not be there, but it's not as straightforward as the ticket savings vs. free flight savings question you put forward. You have to also bear in mind that many miles hunters are logging some (or most) of their travel on an employer's dime.
- Osmium 12y agoI find long-haul cheap flights so miserable that, honestly, anyone who's prepared to do this for the miles I think deserves them. I can't say I'm a big believer in money for its own sake, but if there's one thing I'd want it for it's business class. My god.
- S_A_P 12y agoSeems like a very odd way to spend your time and money. I would argue that the same amount of effort spent trying to make more money would likely pay off better in the long term.
- crusso 12y agoThis is great. I fly because I need to get somewhere, not because I'm trying to game the system to board ahead of the other travelers with my elite status or "earn" bonus mile tickets which just adds extra ticket costs for all of the rest of us.
- ssharp 12y ago> The last point is essential. Leff told me about a mileage run he took in 2003. United ran a promotion where its elite fliers could get five-times bonus miles, instead of the double miles they were ordinarily entitled to. So he flew round-trip to Singapore for $700 and pocketed around 100,000 MileagePlus miles, then enough to redeem for a round-trip business class ticket to Europe. Last time I looked, domestic one-way business class reward seats were going for 25,000 points on MileagePlus, and that's their "Saver" reward, which isn't available as much as their "Standard" reward, which is 50k each way for business class. So it sounds like United is trimming your ability to accrue miles, but also requiring more miles to earn a seat.