Wired: Inside the World of Mileage Running

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We Love to Fly and It Shows: Inside the World of Mileage Running
Dave Demerjian Email 07.10.07 | 2:00 AM

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. More...

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Who else here is a mileage runner? My trips haven't been as crazy as the ones described in the article but my longest day was a JFK-CDG-LHR-JFK flight on AA/BA (LHR-CDG).