Originally Posted by
biglinguist
I'm sure all of us who have participated (or plan to do it again) will tell you that it's terribly terribly expensive and nobody should do it.
It is very time consuming as well. For the financial aspect, when I did it part of the trips were for work related travel. I only paid out of pocket for the flights to complete the badges. I doubt anyone will publicly admit how much they spent on this, it is in the range where people not on FT will question your sanity. If you are planning to participate, you have to calculate your return on investment first. And even then, there is a gambling approach to it. It is not possible to predict the final position on the leaderboard so you could do all flying and miss the mark by a flight or two.