For frequent flyers, program changes leave their many miles up in the air
Jared Baumeister grew up afraid of flying.
“I did not want to fly at all,” he said. “I skipped family vacations on occasions because I was so convinced I was going to die on the plane.”
Baumeister’s father is an aviation attorney who has dealt with some of the most notable plane crashes in U.S. history: Pan Am 103, TWA 800 and the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Those disasters made up normal dinner conversation in the Baumeister home. But in 2009, he gave air travel a second chance. Since then, he estimates he’s taken about 1,000 flights.
“I took a trip from Asia back through Europe and back here, and I realized there was a huge amount of places in the world I wanted to see,” Baumeister said.
Steve Moro, like Baumeister, lives in Manhattan. He likes to jog, but like Baumeister, he logs most of his miles in the air. Moro took his first “mileage run” with Pan Am before the airline folded. Consulting in Eastern Europe and living in New York, frequent flying was part of his lifestyle. The more he flew, the better it got. Tight seats in the back of the plane gave way to plush leather seats that fully reclined.
After 100,000 miles in the air, Moro’s upgrades are now common and complimentary. Moro enjoys 1K-status, just one notch below United’s elusive Global Services program. That club is invitation only – and Moro has yet to receive an invitation. An unusual bout of inertia kept him home over the summer and he’s on the verge of dropping to Silver – the lowest-status tier. And he’s not happy about it.
“If you don’t have status and you do have a lot of miles banked, it’s not as easy to use them,” he said.
The solution? Get on a plane before the end of the year.
Life in first class
The art of the mileage run
Moro’s trip is more of “milecation” than a mileage run.
For Baumeister, that’s not necessarily the case. Piles of tickets topple over his dining room table: Stockholm to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to New York. Some trips to San Francisco, San Jose and Houston were taken multiple times. Why? Miles.
“I’ve never actually been to San Jose despite those trips there the past month,” Baumeister said.
He uses blogs like FlyerTalk and The Points Guy to scout out good fares and plan his trips. Other blogs decry mileage running as “idiotic” – and Baumeister sometimes agrees.
Jared Baumeister
Frequent flyer
“It’s not a pleasant experience,” he said.
Baumeister’s loyalty is being tested further. Starting in February, his United miles won’t be worth as much to overseas destinations like Europe where he does most of his reward travel. Delta is following a similar plan. The news has Baumeister, who is probably switching over to American Airlines next year, trying to burn through almost 800,000 United miles before Feb. 3.
“It breaks my heart,” Baumeister said. “I’m a legacy Continental [Airlines] flyer from back in the day, but the greatest value for your miles with United is to redeem them.”
But don’t think burning through that many miles is easy. For Baumeister, it’s quite complicated, even if the price is right. On a recent run from New York to Chicago to Tokyo to Frankfurt to Stockholm, the price was a mere $92. For first class the whole way, often being the only one occupying the elite section, it’s a steal of a deal. By the end of the trip, he found himself in icy Sweden with only a few hours of light a day.
Meanwhile, Steve Moro heads out on his 11-hour flight to Honolulu, but he didn’t get upgraded to first class. He does have a bulkhead seat though, along with headphones, decent legroom and a private media console.
The next time we saw Moro, he was on the beach, swimming into the sunset, thinking about how to get into that first class seat on the ride home.
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