For the past few weeks my wife and I have been contemplating a long weekend getaway with first-class tickets to Aruba before the year is out. Or, perhaps, a hellacious voyage to Oslo in economy that will involve two plane changes and 18 hours of solid travel in each direction to spend two dark nights in the Scandinavian capital. In December.
Let me explain.
A few weeks ago my wife discovered that she was closer than she’s ever been to achieving top tier status in Delta’s loyalty program.
“I have to fly just 13,000 miles, and I’m Diamond Medallion,” she said excitedly. “Do you want to take a trip somewhere?”
Haha. “Just.” Sure, honey, we could go to Seattle three times. Or Shanghai. I hear the dumplings are not to be missed.
I understand why she would want the top status, given that her work requires a lot of travel. Not only would she be able to bigfoot a lot more people than me for upgrades to first class, but she would get other travel perks, such as lounge access and those highly coveted bag tags from Tiffany. Diamond, yo.
People do this — i.e., take flights simply to accrue status and frequent flyer miles — all the time. It’s called mileage running, and as some of you well know and some of you will be shocked to find out, websites devoted to this pursuit occupy vast swaths of the internet.
Rene deLambert publishes one such site called Delta Points Mileage Run. A recent headline on his blog reads: "ALERT ALERT!! Minneapolis to Wenatchee $147 & 5698MQMs at 2.5CPM weekday Delta Mileage Run." I think that means you will accrue 5698 Delta Medallion Qualification Miles, spending 2.5 cents per mile. I have no idea where Wenatchee is or if, for instance, visitors in December can enjoy the cuisine, go skiing or catch the world-famous Wenatchee Santa Parade.
But that’s not the point of mileage running. People fly to Istanbul to eat a pastry in the airport cafe and turn around to come back. They don’t take in the sights or even crack a phrasebook. It’s all about the MQMs.
“A whole bunch of people have been flying to Scandinavia this year,” said deLambert by phone from the Los Angeles airport, after I told him of our Oslo plans. Last-minute mileage runners have apparently been taking advantage of a price war started by a Norwegian carrier. “People do extreme things when they’ve been putting it off.”
DeLambert himself was returning from Gothenburg, Sweden, where he at least had the added benefit of visiting his mother. Yet his voyage somehow took him from his home in Indiana through Cleveland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York and Amsterdam. The most shocking part to me is that he actually chose to route through Atlanta.
Our plans for a mileage run took on fresh steam when my wife realized she had forgotten to factor in upcoming trips on the docket and was only about 8,000 miles short. Then she was called to a meeting in San Diego.
That was the point when Oslo came on the table.
Her argument: $700! Never been! Fun adventure! More than enough miles!
My rejoinder: Dark! Cold! A never ending misery of air travel! There wasn’t enough aquavit in the world.
I took out a calculator and loaded up the Delta website. After an hour I found a first-class ticket (which carries a mileage bonus) to Aruba for the same price. She would squeak through on her quest.
But she didn’t love the sound of this sojourn. We were already taking a beach vacation with her family for Christmas. There would be nothing to see in Aruba. Did I really want to sit around for two days drinking rum at a cheesy resort with other Americans? (Um, yeah.)
In some warped way we were arguing over the most basic question of travel: What matters more, the journey or the destination?
Then my wife had to go to Philadelphia. Soon after her colleagues requested another meeting in New York just before Christmas, apologizing for the bad timing. “No problem!” she assured them.
With those 1,100 miles to New York and back in the bag, we could basically take a short hop anywhere. She was that close. It was between barbecue and music in Austin or an architectural tour of Detroit. Both sounded like cool weekend destinations to me.
We were about to decide when the New York trip was called off. Uggggghhhh. Back to Delta website. She started looking westward. Phoenix? Calgary? These just sounded to me like places to hold conventions. Please join the National Association of Hello Kitty Fanciers at the Holiday Inn in beautiful downtown Calgary. Author John Grogan will deliver the keynote address: “Kitty & Me: an Obsession.”
Could we go to Denver, our former home, and visit friends? No, alas, Denver was 100 miles short.
Eventually we settled on — and booked — a weekend getaway to Las Vegas, the obvious choice for the get-away-from-it-all crowd. I’m looking forward to it. Especially the face tattoo part.
Do people really like going on mileage runs? Does deLambert?
“Yes,” he says with no equivocation. “I see an airplane take off and think, “Oh shiny! I could be in that plane.”
After hanging up I realized that I forgot to ask this seasoned traveler the really important question: Is Wenatchee nice this time of year? Maybe we can still change our flight.
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