Don't you have to worry about radiation at some point? I mean flying 300 days out of the year has to add up.
A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
31–40 of 184 posts
Re: A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
#32I spend more time than I should in the churning/FF communities (all of which are centered around FlyerTalk). It's fun. Ben's blog is one of the few I follow, most aren't that great. Frequent Miler is a solid resource, as is Wandering Aramean, but nothing beats being active on FlyerTalk itself. In the last five years I've managed to earn and spend about 1.5 million miles and points, with maybe 50k airline miles from a…
do you sometimes feel like you're spending more money in order to get the miles?
Re: A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
#33Don't you have to worry about radiation at some point? I mean flying 300 days out of the year has to add up.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, it's a real issue.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/news/24iht-radiate_ed3__0....
> A 1996 paper published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found a higher incidence of myeloid leukemia, astrocytoma, prostate cancer and malignant melanoma among 2,740 Air Canada pilots than in the general population.
> One study of female flight attendants in Finland and Denmark found an increased rate of breast cancer.
Re: A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually a big circle jerk that benefits the airlines. Most of the strategies that Ben and his cohorts promote is "gaming" credit card signup bonuses. Basically, sign up for X credit card and get X number of of frequent flyer miles. The airlines sell the miles to the cc companies for much cheaper than a consumer could buy and in return get some revenue and customer loyalty. In the case of co-branded credit cards…
I'm surprised these guys haven't gone to the next level and started up their own credit card company. That might allow them to buy frequent flyer miles at the dirt-cheap levels and offer ridiculous signup bonuses for their card. For example, if 100K miles costs them $X, have an annual membership fee of $1.25X and you get 100K miles a year bonus. Or for $12.5X, get 1M miles a year bonus. The use of this as an actual c…
> Or is this only financially viable due to the transaction fees the credit card companies get?
Yes. These reward cards work out to about 1-2% cashback equivalents after the sign up bonuses. From the credit card perspective, the financials are basically identical to their normal "cashback cards".
If you are like me and just want a couple free plane tickets a year, you just pick up 4 new credit cards [~160-200,000 points/miles] and cancel them. If you put 100% of your spending on credit cards and just cycle through the sign up bonuses every 3 months, its really easy and 160k miles is 2 round trip tickets a year anywhere domestically, with some leftover.
Re: A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually a big circle jerk that benefits the airlines. Most of the strategies that Ben and his cohorts promote is "gaming" credit card signup bonuses. Basically, sign up for X credit card and get X number of of frequent flyer miles. The airlines sell the miles to the cc companies for much cheaper than a consumer could buy and in return get some revenue and customer loyalty. In the case of co-branded credit cards…
I'm surprised these guys haven't gone to the next level and started up their own credit card company. That might allow them to buy frequent flyer miles at the dirt-cheap levels and offer ridiculous signup bonuses for their card. For example, if 100K miles costs them $X, have an annual membership fee of $1.25X and you get 100K miles a year bonus. Or for $12.5X, get 1M miles a year bonus. The use of this as an actual c…
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Re: A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
#36Don't you have to worry about radiation at some point? I mean flying 300 days out of the year has to add up.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, it's a real issue. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/news/24iht-radiate_ed3__0.... > A 1996 paper published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found a higher incidence of myeloid leukemia, astrocytoma, prostate cancer and malignant melanoma among 2,740 Air Canada pilots than in the general population. > One study of female flight attendants in Finland and Denmark found an inc…
[deleted]
Re: A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
#37Kudos for him doing what he wants, but why?
> why?
Because he wants to and it works
But the interesting question to me is
> why don't we?
Re: A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
#38Nice, but it's hard to take "Rolling Stone" seriously.
Re: A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
#39I spend more time than I should in the churning/FF communities (all of which are centered around FlyerTalk). It's fun. Ben's blog is one of the few I follow, most aren't that great. Frequent Miler is a solid resource, as is Wandering Aramean, but nothing beats being active on FlyerTalk itself. In the last five years I've managed to earn and spend about 1.5 million miles and points, with maybe 50k airline miles from a…
Any recommendations on how to get started?
Re: A Man Who Flies Around the World for Free
#40I spend more time than I should in the churning/FF communities (all of which are centered around FlyerTalk). It's fun. Ben's blog is one of the few I follow, most aren't that great. Frequent Miler is a solid resource, as is Wandering Aramean, but nothing beats being active on FlyerTalk itself. In the last five years I've managed to earn and spend about 1.5 million miles and points, with maybe 50k airline miles from a…
Any recommendations on how to get started?
I'm not quite sure these days. This hobby has gotten far more complicated than it was when I started. Ben's blog and The Points Guy are probably the best intros. I'm not a fan of TPG but he writes a lot of articles on the basics.
I've been active on FlyerTalk for about five years—after being in that deep for so long, it's hard to step back and figure out where to guide a beginner.
Plus, lots of it is based on your own financial situation. Available funds, credit score, travel profile.
I would argue that the vast majority of people are best served getting 1-2 cards with bonuses they spend in (I use the Amex Everyday Preferred and Chase Sapphire Preferred) and focusing on those. Especially if you have multiple people to bring along, you're better off with one of the flexible points currencies from Chase or Amex (or Citi, theirs is improving) rather than chasing airline-specific miles.
The exception to the multiple-people advice is hotels, as those redemptions are obviously per-room and not per-person. Hyatt offers the best value IMO but Hilton points are stupid easy to earn. Depends on where you want to go as they have very different footprints.