A setback on the road to 25K

I've already suffered my first setback: my first big corporate travel has just been postponed, and it's caused me to cancel a mileage run in April that was only going to cost me 3.2 cents.

Luckily, I do most of my personal booking through Orbitz for Business, which the new corporate handbook on travel allows because they have very good negotiated rates. (Better on AA, but we've already discussed how impractical that is out of MCO.) OFB offers courtesy cancellations within 24 hours, and astonishingly I had just booked my ticket from MCO to PDX a few hours before this business travel trip was cancelled. I was to leave for Los Angeles a week from yesterday.

We are charging our vendor for the cancellation fees for all the people who were scheduled to travel to Los Angeles.

So what's the big deal with my mileage run? Well, the trip to LA has not been canceled -- just postponed. And it looks like it's going to be rescheduled for the week of my original mileage run! In the era of $150 change fees on T-class tickets, I would have lost almost the entire value of the $200 MR fare.

Depending on the rules Delta has for canceled tickets on my LAX trip, I might be able to come up with a higher-mileage routing than the MCO-ATL-LAX route. But this is actually Double Suck because I had squeezed into the window for a special Delta promotion for double miles on the ATL-LAX routing. Hello, 4,000 miles! Not MQMs but still. If you can run the route, might be a good way to get some extra miles, even if they're not MQMs. Register on Delta's Web site.

C'est la vie. Life will go on. The beach in SoCal should be better in April anyway.

Why I choose to fly

There are a lot of ways you can get around this country. It's a really big country, and gas is still fairly cheap. Too cheap, probably. (My grandfather, a former petroleum engineer, always says the only thing cheaper by the gallon than gas is water.)

I work in the media industry and I know a lot of people who will drive from one end of Florida to the other or all the way from Florida to New York or Chicago. Many others take the train, put up with the indignities of Amtrak and the motion sickness. Both groups say they want to see this great country.

And the big knock on people who fly is that they bypass everything between the coasts.

But I prefer to fly.

There's just something about that exhilarating feeling about being thousands of feet up in the air. The glamor is pretty much gone from the airline industry — between buying bad dry sandwiches in coach and only chips or cookies in first class, it might as well be Amtrak's diner car — but the fun of being in a new airport, the joy of just strolling through security... nothing better!

And then, well, the view from the window seat. Can't put a price on that!

How I roll... through airports

There are three basic types of travelers.

Type A travelers are your classic shoulder bag, under seat, minimalist packers. These fliers can pack for a week in a Tom Bihn Aeronaut or even a Tri-Star. They're the guys on FlyerTalk who think you should just take a RedOxx Air Boss for two weeks in Europe!

Type B travelers -- my tribe -- take a rollaboard. In contrast to Type A, many of us also take the "personal item" the airlines allow. My drug of choice is the TravelPro Crew 7 20". I use Eagle Creek packing cubes and a packing folder, so that suitcase can go for four days. (In spite of this I paid something like $500 in luggage fees in 2009. But I had a lot of really long trips with a lot of luggage.) I take with me either my handy Booq Boa Case or Tumi Slim Laptop Brief.

Type C travelers like my girlfriend, C., are totally incapable of traveling without bringing the kitchen sink along with them. They can jam-pack a 27" expanding suitcase (like my Briggs and Riley Baseline) for a three-day conference without breaking a sweat. (I've seen it!) They take a giant duffel bag for two days at the beach. The airlines love passengers like them.

I don't know how the Type A passengers pack. And if I tried to even pretend to know what Type C travelers put in their suitcases, my head would explode. (I caught C. packing a hair dryer on an overnight trip to the beach where we were staying at a Hilton. Seriously.)

But I can tell you what I bring. This example is from a recent five-day business trip to Washington. I have a relatively casual job — dark jeans, dress shirt, blazer — so take with the usual salt. Also, it was unseasonably warm, in the 40s. If it had been more typical Washington-in-January weather, in the 15-30F range, I might have checked a bag, as I did for Chicago in December.

• Dress shirts, 4
• Light-weight sweater, 1
• Jeans, 1 pair
• Underwear, 5 pairs
• Casual shoes
• Socks, 5 pairs
• Athletic shirts, 2
• Athletic shorts, 2
• Athletic socks, 2
• Athletic shoes

I also planned to wear on the plane:

• Wrinkle-free blazer
• Dress shoes
• Light-weight overcoat

This is how it all comes together:

Left: Athletic shoes
Right: Pack-It folder with shirts, jeans, sweater

Middle: Eagle Creek packing cubes with underwear, socks, athletic wear

Right: Toiletries and airplane comfort gear (inflatable pillow, earplugs, eyeshades, slippers) inside black pillow

Add 3-1-1 bag. I use a standard Ziploc quart bag... not interested in rolling the dice on what the TSA might not accept.


You're done!


Note that this approach is a little light on, in particular, shirts, underwear and socks. I always plan to wear some variation on whatever I wore to work when I go out to dinner on a business trip, and the company will reimburse laundering expenses on trips over 4 days in length. For a leisure trip, I might have needed an extra sweater instead of a blazer, and I would've packed only casual shoes.

25,000 miles or bust: An introduction

All my life, I've flown a lot. My family and friends are spread from New York to Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., to Atlanta, and everywhere in between. Every time we wanted to go to a wedding, bar mitzvah or spring break, we had to fly.

As a result I know my primary routes and alternates, how to avoid stopping, what hubs to avoid and where I can kill an hour or a day, and how to pack a bag for overnight or for two weeks. I can spot-check the tags on a checked bag to make sure they're going to the right place by IATA code, and I can even get around some of the European hubs (Barajas, Heathrow, Frankfurt) with familiarity.

But over the years the mileage was so spread over multiple airlines that I never got anything out of it. Even in college, when I was a regular on the AA and HP ORD-PHX routes, I never made elite status. (Why? Splitting my time between AA and HP!)

So here we are. I realized that in 2010 I would probably fly 17K-20K miles. And then I realized, that's only 5,000 miles from elite status! I got pretty close -- 19,000 miles on AA -- in 2009, so it seems like I ought to be able to do that in 2010.


My goal for 2010 is to make 25,000 miles on Delta: Silver Medallion status. I live in Orlando, which is a minor DL hub (nonstops to LAX!), and Delta has the same perk as HP: automatic upgrades based on availability. They also waive baggage fees, which is great when you're flying to Argentina with two checked bags. (!) I've also done the math: the program is worth about $500 in waived baggage fees in a typical year for me. I will spend up to an additional $250 for the other benefits, like better seats. Believe it or not, I paid $80 in US Airways "choice seats" fees in 2009!

(An aside: I know the AA/UA program is better on paper, where flying 10,000 miles earns you four 500-mile upgrades. But that takes all the fun out of upgrades.)

The bottom line: my regular flights to see family and friends plus mileage runs, as you frequent fliers probably know. I'll get a tour of America's great airports!


So I'll be blogging here -- at least once a week! -- about that quest, plus the tools, the gear, and the lifestyle of flying regularly.