A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free

For the beginners out there:

1. Be sure to read as much about earning miles as redeeming them. Both sides are equally important and redeeming is actually getting much more difficult.

2. Don't let the newbie blogs lure you into hitting credit cards too hard. Banks are starting to tighten the clamps on our hobby. Be sure to learn, start slow, and then start ramping up. Banks like to see a relationship, not just a high credit score.

3. If you're dipping your toe in Manufactured Spending (MS), start small then ramp up over time. Nothing worse than getting shut down for hitting something too hard. That said, MS is a great way to meet minimum spending without using too much money.

4. Don't let headline point valuations fool you into thinking you have to fly in Biz or First to get a good value on your points. Blogs use these kinds of numbers mostly to get you to sign up for CC's. Figure out your your strategy and go that way. A person looking for a lot of domestic flights is going to have a different strategy than someone looking to travel like saryant (and myself, incidentally).

tl;dr; This hobby is amazing if you can figure it out and do the leg work. I too enjoy good champagne 35k ft in the air ;)

If you have any questions, AMA! :)

There's a variety of justifications, such as "banks are evil anyway" or invoking Plunkitt, but they just never really sat with me.

I always assumed people on HN would be all over this kind of thing, it's a total minmax optimization problem. Especially back when this was even more of a game, with the US Airways Grand Slam through 2011. The puzzle there is worth reading about. You'd get up to 100,000 bonus miles for completing 36 'partner activities' (bonuses are only awarded in groups of 4 activities -- 1,2,3 you get nothing and at 4 you get all the miles for that group -- and the number of miles awarded for each group of 4 increased from nominal to significant. I spent weeks optimizing and figuring the marginal cost. After minmaxing the hell out of your strategy, you execute; fill in surveys, buy the cheapest thing on Skymall (in my case, a toilet lock for a child I didn't have), book phantom rides on the super shuttle. Maybe spend a few bucks and splurge on a bamboo plan. Ended at 140K miles for $700 -- at the time just short of 2 round trip business class tickets from North America -> Europe -> Asia -> North America.

Once you get into it, your average getaway is better than most peoples' honeymoons; I flew Etihad apartments to the Maldives for a weekend for 75K miles and $100. And that was just one of the many.

Agreed, lucky is one of my favorites. I actually got started with The Points Guy but the quality has gone downhill so much, and the blog has become a shill for card signups even if they don't make sense. My other favorite is Matthew at upgrd and Efficient Asian Man.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/news/24iht-radiate_ed3__0....

> A 1996 paper published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found a higher incidence of myeloid leukemia, astrocytoma, prostate cancer and malignant melanoma among 2,740 Air Canada pilots than in the general population.

> One study of female flight attendants in Finland and Denmark found an increased rate of breast cancer.

PS: Have fun with TSA.

What do you find morally questionable about churning? It's game in which banks and airlines write the rules and reserve the right to change them unilaterally.

I do find the "mileage runs" a bit odd. You spend a day or two just flying and hanging out at airports? I guess it's all cost/benefit, but that would be a little to much for me.

That said, whatever floats you boat. Looks like a lot of people are really maximizing the points programs. Good for them!

Who hasn't overfilled their cup many times at self-serve drinks counter? Been back for three plates of ice cream at a buffet?

It's sounds like a lot of work but completely harmless. Finding loopholes in complicated systems to me seems like a type of arbitrage mor than anything.

There are some in the FF community who fly first class to Tokyo and then return the next day but they're a very small minority.

I get that some people might like this. I was speaking to my other half about it last night. People go on about how great first class is. I wondered if people had a choice between teleportation and first class which would they choose? I'd go for teleporting. I think most would.

So how great can first class be if I'd willingly exchange it for just the time back?

This sort of sentence is extremely annoying to me. I'm good at several things, one of which is a video game that I've played for most of my life, so I've heard people say things like this for a good portion of my existence and it's up there with some of my biggest pet peeves. I've noticed that when people say this, it's usually a skillset that bothers them on some level, and usually for reasons that are unconscious to the person saying it.

No one says "you could spend more time developing a valuable skillset" to me regarding, say, fitness, because most people would enjoy having better bodies and the reasons for this are immediately apparent. But they'll say this regarding a few video games I am extremely good at, even though the results of having a better body and being really good at a video game are both satisfaction on my end. You might say that fitness leads to better health, but that's still using the assumption that health maximizes enjoyment in some way by extending the number of years you're alive -- because no one would be parading health as a virtue if every year alive were miserable.

I'm sure the reasons differ, but the mentality is always the same: this thing I derive obvious satisfaction from is objectively good ("bettering myself"), while this thing I can't see obvious satisfaction from (or are threatened by) is a waste of time, even if both, extended to their ultimate goal, just result in more satisfaction. It ignores that our skillsets have the same extensional goal: things we value. When you extend the purpose of your skillsets, you're always going to end up with some sense of "I value this thing."

Example: a lot of guys will improve their skillsets so they can get money so they can have lots of sex with women they find really attractive. But if you're already able to do that, and that's your primary motivation for doing that, then you're not going to have as much of an incentive to develop that skillset. Conversely, if the skillset is intrinsically satisfying to you, you'll eschew sex and develop it. But the goal is the same thing: maximizing your own utility from what you value.

You'd better a skillset, in other words, to derive more satisfaction. And since you don't know that they don't already have a developed skillset, since lots of people are good at many things, you don't know how much satisfaction they already derive from their existing skillsets. So you're just saying "you should better yourself" in a vacuum, which is effectively telling them that they could be deriving more satisfaction arbitrarily, even if they're already deriving lots of satisfaction.

So either this ignores that you'd do these things for more satisfaction anyway, or presumes that you can tell a person you've never met how much they're going to get (or should be getting) satisfaction from utilization of their skillsets, which is insanely presumptuous.

It's basically a Swedish/Scandinavian "FlyerTalk" community. One part editorial and many parts community/forum.

Within three years of starting I had available credit of 150% of my income.

For instance, redeeming AA miles on Japan Airlines will generally cost <$100 in taxes even in first class for a US->Japan flight.

If you really are flying into LHR from the US, one alternative is to fly into a different city in Europe and connect over.

Because he wants to and it works

But the interesting question to me is

> why don't we?

Tightening up the rules or banning these users might be bad PR for them they don't want to deal with.