«Last year I went to Hawaii for two days flying from Milan to London, from London to New York, from New York to Phoenix and then from Phoenix to Honolulu. In a month, however, I have plans for a round trip to Singapore with stopovers in Sofia, Doha and Kuala Lumpur. Once I also traveled around the world in five days: Londra, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sidney, Oakland, Honolulu, Vancouver, London». Matteo Rainisio defines himself as a “frequent flyer”, i.e. one who travels very often by plane, and has been managing the Italian website for some years The Flight Clubin which he publishes guides and advice on how to accumulate points and re-enter loyalty programs to travel very comfortably while spending as little as possible.
The journeys he makes from one city to another, often without ever leaving the airports, are not his whim but something that many travelers like him do all over the world: they are called mileage runs, a term that in Italian can be roughly translated as “giri per le miles”. The purpose of mileage runs it’s not traveling – at least not immediately – but accumulating the points necessary to re-enter airline loyalty programs and guarantee yourself various types of benefits and privileges for a year.
Although it has a more than marginal environmental impact in the total of polluting emissions produced by civil aviation, this paradoxical phenomenon in many ways has become an example of the problems of airline loyalty programs, which encourage flying a lot in a historical period in which it is the awareness that instead we should fly as little as possible is increasingly widespread. “THE mileage runs they can have a tiny impact on global climate change. But it’s the most grotesque kind of behavior imaginable.” he said al New York Times Richard Carmichael, a researcher at Imperial College London who published a climate report in 2020 that contains a proposal to ban airline loyalty programs.
The mileage runs they are a phenomenon that has existed for several years all over the world, but has spread above all in the United States, where the distances are greater and people are used to often taking the plane to move from one city to another. In 2006, about one million of these empty trips were estimated, e a recent survey of the American site The Hustle reported that of 550 frequent travelers more than 60 percent said they had done at least one.
Airlines began introducing their first loyalty programs in the 1980s, giving away free travel to frequent customers. Over the years, these programs have become more sophisticated: different levels of “loyalty” (the so-called “status”) have been created and different ways to accumulate points have been introduced, with flights that made it possible to multiply the distances actually traveled in the final tally. THE mileage runs began to spread in the early 2000s: the aim, then as now, was to find flights that would allow you to accumulate as many miles as possible at low prices, to obtain advantages and privileges without spending a fortune. Some took the opportunity to spend twenty-four hours on the other side of the world, others didn’t even plan to leave the airport.
Each airline offers different advantages for its most loyal customers, but in general the most recurring ones are the possibility of skipping lines at the airport, free check-in of baggage, boarding the plane before the others, having access to a “lounge” area while waiting and to get your baggage back before the others after landing. One of the major advantages for the most frequent customers is having access to what the airlines call “upgrades”, i.e. transfers from normal, “economy” seats to seats in first class or “business” class, when there are free ones . In many cases the status also extends to a guest.
In the United States, things began to change between 2015 and 2016, when the main airlines that offered loyalty programs – Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and American Airlines – introduced “loyalty” calculation models based not only on distances travelled, but on a combination of factors including money spent. This has made the accumulation of loyalty points more expensive and mileage runs less profitable. Last December, a 25-year-old told the Wall Street Journal that I spent $1,300 to fly from New York to Milan, spend two nights in a hostel there, take a flight to San Francisco, and then immediately fly back to New York—all to move up to the next level in Delta Air’s loyalty program lines.
In general, after the pandemic and the resulting crisis in the sector, prices have increased significantly and finding truly affordable fares for flights has become more difficult. Delta, for example, no longer expects miles to be earned by flying on the economy fare, the so-called Basic Economy, and has raised the annual cost to access its most advantageous loyalty program from $15,000 to $20,000. In the US, many also complain that upgrades have become much less likely, as airlines have introduced marketing strategies to sell more first and business class seats.
Despite everything, however, last December the Wall Street Journal he wrote that “tradition persists and those who practice it are undaunted”. There are even those who live there mileage runs as experiences in themselves: flight and airport blogger Chris Carley he said to organize them together with his wife as appointments: “we have to turn off the phones, there is nothing to distract us, and we have time to sit down and talk”.
Second Rainisio, things are a bit different in Europe: «in Europe some loyalty programs reward you more than in the United States, because the market here is not yet as saturated as it is there. In Europe, and above all in Italy, there are far fewer mileage runners like me».
Since the early 2000s, there have been experts in the United States of mileage runs who explain in blogs and newsletters the most effective strategies to rise in status by spending as little as possible. In Europe there are fewer of them and in Italy Rainisio is one of the few who do: «when people ask me for advice the first thing I say is that they have to create an Excel file and figure out whether having the status is economically convenient for them or not: if one makes a few flights a year is different than if he commutes from Genoa to Rome every week and flies in “economy”. In this case, having the status is convenient, to check in a bag for free even with the cheapest ticket, to use the lounge and to save time. Another thing to take into account is that status makes the difference if you travel a lot in “economy”, because if you always travel in “business” it is of little use since you pay for all the privileges».