Travel Story: Buying a Lifetime Airline Pass

So would you pay $290k, and then fly 23 milllion miles, first class, for a cash payment of about $500k?

It reminds me of my daughter when she was really little at one of these arcade type places. She found some game that spit out a lot of tickets fast. So she’d put in a token, maybe worth a quarter, and something would happen and it would spit out 10 tickets. After she accumulated maybe 100 tickets she’d go to the prize counter and cash the tickets in for a trinket that probably cost 10 cents.

 

Once again you’re excluding the value of the flights he took from your math. It’s not like the arcade example at all, as he got both the flights AND the miles. Not just the miles. He just made a silly choice to never get off the plane.

If the average flight to Europe is 15,000 miles round trip, and he has 23 million frequent flier miles, that’s equal to 1533 round trip flights. At a conservative $2k/first class ticket per trip that’s $3m worth of flights for a cost of $290,000, a 10x + return on his investment. Plus he now has 23 million miles in his frequent flier account. At $0.10/mile, that’s another $230k. I’d say he got a good deal for his money, about an 11x return.

 

We are talking past each other. Yes I understand the flights have value. But for most people the intrinsic value of a flight is the destination, not he flight itself. For this person the reason he took the flights was to get the points. Now maybe if he really enjoyed flying and the first class experience, the food, the lounge experiences then perhaps it makes more sense. But as I see it, let’s say he took a flight that would otherwise cost $500, and was round trip 2000 miles. 2000 mileage points is about $40. So he used a service valued at $500 (but at zero incremental cost to him), and spent maybe 6-8 hours total of his time, for a reward of about $40. If an airline paid you $50 to fly on a jet all day long, first class, would you do it - assuming you never got off the plane or left the airport ?

 

Maybe he just liked the airplane food

 

Back to back flights between NYC and Sydney for the win!

 

Just depends where you start. LA to Greece is about 7,000 miles one way and LA to Tokyo is about 5,500.

 

Oof. He made the wrong decision then.