In early 2020, the pandemic struck and travel came to a crashing halt. There were some personal reasons why I couldn't get back to this insanity until October of 2023. I was sitting on 3.12 million miles in September of last year. I started up again in October and flew at a rate of almost 100,000 miles each month. On June 16 of this year, I finally reached 4,001,489 million miles traveling to London from LAX and now sit at 4,006,945 million. I am still suffering from withdrawal symptoms!

Trips in 2023/24 involved many more domestic round trips: Florida and Hawaii were my go-to destinations. I also had great value flying to Dubai. While prices for trips at sub three cents a mile could be found BC, they weren’t available AD. Sub 3 cpm popped up occasionally for LAX to SIN in 2018, I still found value in that destination. I was able to fly LAX/DEN/SFO/SIN/SFO/DEN/LAX AD a few times at well under five cents a mile.

The pre-pandemic and post-pestilence mileage runs differed in other ways. In 2018/19 it was possible to hop on a plane to SIN; shower and breakfast at the airport, and then come straight home, often on the same aircraft. In fact, when I did the compressed double runs (which became the norm in 2018/19), the crew that I initially flew out with worked the return on my second round trip. I flew 900,000 in mileage runs in 2018/19 (flights I wouldn't otherwise have taken) and about 127,000 on work related flights. Contrast that with the flights since last October: 880,000 in mileage runs and 23,000 "normal" flights. The table below shows the miles flown on runs each month. There were no runs in 2020 through September of last year.




The total cost for all of these flights was $85,850 for 1,798,953 miles or 4.77 cpm with 461 segments. There were 140 mileage run trips with an average distance of 12,850 miles round trip. The lowest fare was 2.348 cpm; the highest was 24.329. The median cost was 4.072 cpm. The last run was in PremiumPlus on a flight from LAX to LHR.

I could have gotten the total cost down to under 4.5 cpm, but I did take a couple of W fares to SIN in 2018/19. I discovered that upgrades were a lot easier to get on a Tue-Thu turn. What really triggered my paying the extra $300 to $400 was that if I flew LAX/SFO/SIN/LAX, one GPU was pulled for two, international segments. SFO/SIN was hard to get (easier mid-week), but LAX/SIN was fairly easy. Back then a GPU was awarded every 25,000 BIS miles. So I used 1 GPU to upgrade both international legs on LAX/SFO/SIN/LAX, which earned 17,714 getting me well on the way to another GPU certificate.

The top ten runs, BC and AD, were SIN (58), OGG (17), KOA (11), DXB (9), LHR (8), MIA (7), HKG (7), MEL (4), FLL (4), and NRT (2); they're tabulated below. They didn't have BE in 2018/19, but with the exception of DXB, NRT and one trip to LHR, all recent (AD) flights were in basic economy. I managed to secure a window seat for over 90% of the flights in BE.

As I mentioned, flights in 2018/19 didn't involve an overnight stay, except for one flight to SIN, where the return was canceled because of a maintenance issue. It was one forced overnight out of 41 trips to SIN and my first time outside that airport. In 2023/24, when I had to use a hotel, I ate up points (I had over three million with Hilton, so gobbled up a million with my antics). Transport to and from the airport involved using points with Hertz; I had almost 60,000; I am now down to 19k. I used the train in SIN and Uber in DXB. No domestic trip involved a planned overnight in a hotel (one did involve a forced overnight at IAD, which was covered by United). Of the 140 trips and 461 segments, I only had two or three misconnects and five IRROPs. If I added in incidental costs, they'd contribute at most 0.1 cents per mile.

It turns out that I have atypical flexibility at work, and what I was able to do, particularly over the past nine months, isn't scalable. I am lucky in the sense that of the $85.9k paid in flights for all of these shenanigans, just under $17k was out-of-pocket. If you can do the same, I thoroughly recommend it. You do need a body that can survive coach for 18 hours at a shot!

Here’s where I flew in those twenty-four mileage run months.




I'll try and anticipate and answer some questions next.