We Love to Fly and It Shows: Inside the World of Mileage Running

July 10, 2007 — -- Dehydrated and exhausted, I approach the gate agent and ask if she can find me a better seat for the red-eye to Chicago. "Eight flights in one day?" she asks suspiciously when my itinerary appears on her computer screen. "You one of those United Airlines mystery shoppers?"

I assure her I'm not, and wonder if she'll decide that my strange trip warrants a call to the TSA. But a few seconds later she hands me a new boarding pass. "Exit row, window" she says with a wink. "Write nice things about me in your report, Mr. Secret Shopper."

I wasn't a secret shopper, but I was 18 spine-crushing hours into a knight's tour of airport terminals in Chicago, Las Vegas, San Diego and three other cities. Wired News gave me $500 and a mission: Squeeze as many miles as possible out of those five bills, using the tricks and techniques invented by a subculture of airline hackers called "mileage runners" who specialize in accumulating frequent flyer miles at low cost. Now with more than 6,000 miles and 31 hours booked, my only problem was how to spend the other $224.

Mileage runners are the high-tech nomadic wanderers of the air. Predominantly male, generally obsessed with flying and miles, and typically employed in white-collar careers that involve significant business travel, they scour the web for cheap flights, phoning in sick or using vacation days to fly the longest itineraries they can string together.

Five Steps to a Successful Mileage Run

Booking long, inexpensive flights can help you run up the maximum miles. Here's how:

1. Use the interactive maps at Travelocity or FareCompare to find a cheap round-trip flight from your home city.

2. Locate full fare and routing rules for the flight. Many sites offer only a truncated version, but Priceline lists the complete rules.

3. Study restrictions that apply to the flight you've chosen, paying special attention to the routing rules, which dictate how many connections you can make and in which cities.

4. Use ITA's Trip Planner software to build specific itineraries that meet the fare and routing rules.

5. Once Trip Planner has located a trip that meets your criteria, attempt to book it on the appropriate airline's website, or on Orbitz, which is powered by ITA's software. If this fails, contact the airline by phone to book the itinerary, being sure to give the agent the fare and booking codes provided by ITA. A mileage runner might extend his New York to Seattle trip by adding a connection in, say, Miami. Or he might spend 16 hours flying to London, grab a pint at Heathrow, and then immediately board a flight back home. If the price is right, she might fly back and forth between two cities four times in a single day.

For mileage runners, getting there isn't half the fun -- it's the whole point.

"I personally find airlines and airplanes to be really neat," explains Joshua Solomin, a 28-year-old mileage runner who works as a software manager in San Francisco. Solomin began running in 2006 after a year of business travel vaulted him into the Premier tier of United's Mileage Plus program, giving him his first taste of the first-class upgrades and other coveted perks that come with elite-level frequent flyer membership. "Mileage runs are a way to maintain that status," he says.

Of Solomin's five runs to date, one of the more impressive was a trip from San Francisco to Tampa via Los Angeles, San Diego and Washington, then back with connections in D.C., Seattle and Portland. Thanks to his Premier status, he earned double miles for the trip, more 16,000 of them, for just $232.

On Sunday, he completed his first international run: a $1,450 round trip between San Francisco and Singapore with stops in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Sure, he had only five hours in the middle of the night to explore Singapore, but with United's July triple mileage bonus he earned a whopping 78,000 miles. And he flew business class the entire way.