The magic of "mileage runs"

Here we are again. Another day, another winner of 340,000 Hilton Honors points. That's a lot of guacamole if you know what I mean…

Are you ready, kids? *ay ay, captain*

The lucky winner is………….. Marta K! Wooh! You now have almost as many Hilton points as there are reasons not to fly on Ryanair! Congrats!

As always, if you are indeed the winner then you have received a private email from me letting you know. Check out our post that breaks down the value of these points with some examples of how you can use them for great value. For the rest of you, the post also shows you how you can easily earn close to this many Hilton points without even trying, so here you go:

Yesterday in the newsletter I hinted at something I'm doing today that helps me earn tons of great benefits. I called it a mileage run, and many of you emailed in asking what exactly that is. This is a bit more of an advanced travel hacking topic, but I thought I'd break it down for you today.

So today I'm flying from Athens home to Toronto. I have only been in Athens for 24 hours and am not here for the sightseeing. Instead, I flew here from Switzerland yesterday so that I could have a longer and more expensive flight back home.

Ummmmmm… Why?

Because this is a mileage run. A mileage run is when you go out of your way to fly specific airlines/routes/distances in order to unlock certain benefits. In my case, that benefit is Air Canada elite status.

As a Toronto-based traveler, having status with Air Canada is very important to me - it gets me unlimited lounge access all around Canada and the world, and gives me tons of free business class upgrades on long-haul flights, priority boarding, priority security, priority check-in, free checked bags, free Wi-Fi on flights, and even lets me gift certain benefits to my friends. Let's just say that to me, it's worth going pretty far out of my way to renew every year.

Every program has different requirements for earning elite status and different benefits that you get, but for now, I'll use my specific case as an example to illustrate how I keep this status every year with relative ease.

To obtain status with Air Canada, you need to do a combination of the following:

• Spend a certain amount of money
• Fly a specific number of miles
• Fly a specific number of segments (individual flights, i.e. if you have a layover you get TWO segments)

The flight I'm taking today was planned meticulously to give me a huge boost on the number of miles flown. Here's how it works:

For months now, Air Canada has had a promotion to earn double miles and double dollars spent on flights to and from Europe. So, If I fly from London to Toronto (which has a distance of 3,556 miles), I would earn 7,112 miles. If the flight cost $500, I would get $1,000 toward my status renewal.

Now there are also different fare classes. If I fly basic economy, I get no miles (and I have to let them chop off my hand if I decide to cancel). If I fly standard economy, I get 50% of the miles flown. I, however, am flying Latitude Economy, which earns 125% of the miles flown. I can also use my current elite status to upgrade this economy flight to a lie-flat business class seat which makes the experience even more amazing (and is the exact reason I want to make sure I still have it next year).

This means that on my flight from Athens to Toronto (which is 5,063 miles), I'll earn the following number of miles toward status:

5,063 miles x 125% (fare class) x 2 (double miles promotion) = 12,658 miles

I'm also flying BACK to Greece in a couple of weeks on the same route, which means from my round-trip booking, I'll earn over 25,000 miles. This will put me at a total of 77,000 status miles for the year, just barely qualifying me for 75k Elite Status (the second-highest tier that they offer). Though the lowest tier of elite status only requires 25,000 miles total, which you could unlock with this one round-trip flight.

I'll also let you in on a little secret: The reason I made a round-trip booking departing from Europe is that round-trip flights from Europe to North America are WAY cheaper than the other way around. This gets into another advanced travel-hacking topic called "nested flights," a tactic that I use all the time to maximize the value of my travel. But we'll save that for another newsletter 😉

Basically, a one-way ticket from Toronto to Athens would cost MORE than this round-trip and would only earn me 5,000 miles (without the promo). Instead, I'm paying LESS money and earning a whopping 25,000 miles.

For me, these benefits are invaluable. I use them frequently and get tons of value out of them every week. Given the amount of travel I do, it's well worth spending the extra money and the extra 3 hours flying to Greece to position myself for this strategic flight. And 24 hours in Athens isn't the worst thing either 😛

If having these benefits sounds interesting to you, take a look at your airline of choice and try to knock out the requirements by taking advantage of promotions when they happen. This is a great way to beat airlines at their own game and elevate your travel experience.

If there's one thing we ALL know about Ghana, it's that they have a robust and cautious aircraft reliability evaluation program. What a cliché, right?

Well, Ghana came out of the gate with a pretty salty move directed at Delta by banning one of their Boeing 767s from Ghanian airspace. I'm not talking about ALL Boeing 767s from Delta, I mean ONE specific piece of metal. It's very weird. But not totally unreasonable when you know the background…

Basically, Delta owns a 25-year-old Boeing 767-300ER that has had a number of recent technical issues, some of them affecting Ghana directly.

The plane in question was supposed to fly from New York to Accra, Ghana on July 24th. Unfortunately, the flight was canceled due to technical issues and rescheduled for the following day. When the rescheduled flight departed New York, it turned around 2 hours into the flight and landed back in New York - again because of technical difficulties. A week later, the plane successfully flew to Accra (yay). BUT the next day when it flew back to New York, it AGAIN had to turn around and land back in Ghana because of ANOTHER technical issue.

Well, I know that was a more tedious newsletter to read, but I want to sprinkle in some of these more advanced travel hacking techniques every once in a while for those of you who are trying to go ham on this stuff.

Do you like learning about advanced travel-hacking topics like this? Did I scare you into not wanting to fly Delta anymore (sorry)? Let me know by replying to this email or reaching out on social media.

Safe travels,