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.
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.
Status is important to mileage runners -- Solomin refers to himself as a "United 1K" the way I refer to myself as a writer -- but there's more to running's appeal than just the airline rewards. "If you like puzzles, it's lots of fun," says Solomin. Assembling a mileage run means deciphering complex fare rules and pulling together information from up to a dozen websites. It's an achievement that tickles the same satisfying problem-solving centers of the brain as a Sudoku puzzle, and always ends in the deep-rooted human thrills of travel and flight.
To get prepared for my own run, I spent weeks lurking on FlyerTalk.com, a message board that serves as a hub for the mileage obsessed. It's the place where runners post their itineraries, search for deals and seek advice from like-minded mileage hounds ("Need help on AA MR from ORD," pleads one post). From there I learn the basics, then start planning a beginner's trip.
Mileage runner Samir Bhatnagar's first trip between Washington D.C. and San Francisco cost $113, and yielded 27,000 miles.
Using Travelocity's Dream Maps, I scour for cheap round-trip flights originating from my home base in Boston. Then I carefully parse the applicable rules and restrictions to figure out when I can travel and to map out various routing options (a BOS-SYR-ROC-BUF-PIT-WAS/BWI-RDU routing rule indicates that if the connections exist, I'm allowed stops in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo and either Washington D.C. or Baltimore on my way to Raleigh-Durham).
Finally, I plug potential trips into a little-known travel website run by an airline-software firm that excels at complicated route planning, painstakingly stacking multiple connections like Jenga blocks to create the longest itinerary possible without breaking the fare.
It all seems straightforward enough, but each time I attempt to purchase my flights on Orbitz, a mileage runner favorite that can handle complex, multi-segment itineraries, something goes wrong: There are no more seats, or a connection is too close for comfort.
Finally though, I have my trip. I'll leave Boston on a Tuesday at 6 a.m. and arrive in Las Vegas 13 hours later, making stops in Washington D.C., San Diego and San Francisco. After a six-hour layover in the City of Sin, I'll board the midnight red-eye for Chicago, then fly back through Washington D.C. before finally arriving in Boston at 1 p.m. on Wednesday.
I add it all up using a website called Great Circle Mapper: While the nonstop roundtrip comes in at 4,762 miles, my run will yield 6,356. And the whole thing costs just $275.80.
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