Canarsie

Last month, the current iteration of FlyerTalk quietly celebrated 25 years in existence.

That is old enough to rent a vehicle without being charged an underage driver fee.

25 years is long enough to ask this simple question: who grew up on FlyerTalk?

Please relate your story here.

ElevatorEnthusiast

I did - I was first exposed to FlyerTalk as a young teenager when my older brother was heavily investing in the Starwood ecosystem and we would both lurk on these forums without accounts. I got my own account shortly after taking my first solo trip in 2020.

SPN Lifer

Not me. I was already a quadragenarian when FlyerTalk came to be.

FriendlySkies

I feel like I did, though I only joined FT when I was 18 during my freshman year at college. The amount of knowledge and the numerous, wonderful friendships I've made over the past fourteen years has been incredible. Very thankful to Randy for creating FT.

Eastbay1K

I can relate that I can't relate to the topic.

Your lifetime Alaska miles since 1986

xxxxxxThanks for being a member of Mileage Plan for 37 years.

dinoscool3

I did! I joined a month before my 13th birthday. My parents and I have always been travelers, but around that age I got bit with the frequent flier bug. I've been very active on FlyerTalk since then. I try not too look at the posts teenage me made

GW McLintock

I joined FlyerTalk in my senior year of high school, but I didn't really become active until a couple of years later when I was in college and really starting to learn the mileage and status games.

Back in high school I was very active on another aviation website and live online chat room. I keep in touch with a number of those people to this day on Whatsapp. One of them had a baby last week.

-J.

JAXPax

Wow, two days ago (6/10) was my 19th "FlyerTalk birthday." Hard to believe it's that long... I would have been a college junior. And with the thanks of this site, within the next year I would be a Hilton Gold (it used to almost mean something) and me and my roommates would get a $60 rate at the full flag Hilton down in Orlando, get free upgrade to executive floor with lounge access, and go make a weekend of not having to use a dorm bathroom and having as many cubes of cheese as we could eat.

A year later I was reading fare rules to turn my trips home from simple JAX-PHL affairs to JAX-CLT-DCA-PIT-PHL for the same price to make US Airways status, eventually a Chairman's Preferred a couple years later when US had the infamous Watertown, New York (ART) fare error of $1.86 for a full Y round trip and I bought like 10 of them... six segment same day round trip, in full fare as a CP, 20th anniversary of Dividend Miles promo, and a half dozen in, I was spitting out enough miles for a free domestic ticket with each trip. I spent a lot of Saturdays in grad school studying that way, making use of the copy machines in the US Airways Clubs in PIT and CLT. I actually was one of the first to visit ART... I bought it on the day of the error for travel the next day... myself and a FTer from Newark (I am forgetting her name) met there, and reported back that US would honor the tickets.

I was a proud wearer of a FFOCUS Cockroach pin on US Airways flights. Who would have thought that I'd end up working for some of those US execs at another airline.

Haven't written a trip report since way back then... and I think I had about ten years where I seldomly posted... mainly because I was an airline manager and half what I read on here made me mad (no, every time your upgrade didn't clear does not mean the gate agent's seemingly endless group of friends stole it from you). Guess I've calmed down.

I could myself blessed for the friends I've made along the way... many of them from that FFOCUS/US Airways group and we have continued on Facebook and just a couple weeks ago about 10 of us met up for dinner in Charlotte for the first time in ages. While I was station manager for an airline at a major airport I saw some folks regularly as they passed through for consulting (and when I broke my leg I posed in photos with one member as their alibi for why they were repeatedly in the area "to take care of a friend" hahaha).

I haven't been much of an attendee of any FT "do's" though I think I may start.

Duke787

I joined FT shortly after I graduated college and started traveling full time as a consultant. I was a lurker for a couple of years, coming across FlyerTalk while searching for various reviews of hotels in the cities that work was taking me. Ultimately I joined a couple of years later when I started researching a pre-business school trip to Australia/New Zealand and wanted to figure out how to maximize my UA miles to make it happen!

That research ended up leading to an epic trip of JFK - ICN (OZ F) - NRT - BKK (TG A388 F) - SYD (TG 747 F) - AKL (EK F) - PEK (CA J) - NRT (CA J) - IAD (NH F). From then on I was hooked and have been an active contributor and participant (both sharing knowledge and gaining a whole lot more than I share).

The only exception was during COVID when I didn't engage due to lack of travel -- likely the only reason I haven't hit the 10k post mark is because that 18 month period was pretty low volume for me compared to other years

Long Train Runnin

I found FlyerTalk back in High School.

Although, based on my join date I would have been a freshman in college at the time.

Back then I was a rail fan beyond comprehension. I tried to take the train absolutely everywhere. Obviously, that made INTL travel complex if not impossible. I didn't care I was too busy trying to ride every rail transit system in North America. (I am like 75% done with that goal)

I know those first few years I really didn't post much. I would say it all really "clicked" with a mistake fare to CTA in 2014. Met some really cool FT folks on that trip, and they were very supportive. In 2015 I was now flying enough to be a EXP on AA.

Really came into my own in 2016 when I booked a next day fare to IPC (Easter Island). It was at the time my number 1 bucket list destination by far. When I realized that I had the time and money to just go well it changed everything for me. Since then I have kind of positioned my whole life around traveling as much as possible. I have been to 125+ countries now and my last two jobs have been all about ensuring that I stay on the road as much as I can. Staying home for COVID and the whole world locking down only made me realize that this is the path for me. I don't want to be a home body, or work in a job with 0 travel.

When I first started reading this forum I couldn't fathom how you could fly every week, and stay 100 nights a year in hotels. By 2019 I had my first 200+ nights on the road year. Things are slowly picking back up and I hope by 2024 I am back at that kind of pace.

I have now even become a moderator of a few small forums, and enjoy helping the community in this capacity. Along the way I have been to many DOs and made several close personal friends that I have now traveled around the world with.

I absolutely grew up on Flyertalk and frequent flying has defined my adult life without question. I can't imagine what I would be doing if not for Flyertalk.

El_Chiflero

Similar-ish to FS and J, I was a young adult in 2009 when I joined Flyer talk. I was 24 when I was trying to find discount codes to rent Infiniti's from Hertz for cheap. That is what brought me onto the website. I haven't been the same since.

jackal

There's a common theme here among a lot of us...

I joined FlyerTalk in college. I'd long been a traveler (I just had dinner with three generations of family last night, and the topic of our entire family being bitten by the travel bug came up--apparently even my great-grandfather had always enjoyed travel and road-tripping, even back in the 1930s when cars were slow!), and I'd even been to 36 of the 44 countries in Europe, plus US/Canada/Mexico and Morocco, prior to joining FT. As well, I'd had a UA MileagePlus account and an AS Mileage Plan account since I was a teenager and had even held an Alaska Airlines Visa Signature card for a couple years (as probably every adult resident of Alaska does) prior to my learning of FlyerTalk, so I had a passing knowledge of frequent flyer program, though of course not how to maximize rewards and benefits.

My recollection is that I initially discovered FT via a trip report posted by the esteemed Seat 2A (FAIRBANKS TO KALGOORLIE - THE LONG WAY). With tales of high-end food and drink in lie-flat transoceanic First Class (which I'm not sure I even knew existed prior to that), his trip report inspired me like nothing I'd read previously, and within four years of joining FlyerTalk (and two of actually being active), I managed to recreate his trip with my newly-minted stash o' miles, thanks to everything I had learned from the FlyerTalk community (and some mileage-run-worthy-from-ANC fares). While I was no stranger to traveling, the ability to jet-set around the world in luxury practically for free has opened up countless doors (not the least of which is my now 11.5 years at my dream job, which FlyerTalk is 100% directly responsible for).

It was also through some of those early posts on FT that I met the people I now consider my closest core social group, and discovering the community that makes up FT (especially in real life: I'm grateful that one of the first FT members I met in person, fellow Alaskan BOB W, was involved in the in-person FT community and invited me to join him at the last two SeaDos hosted by missydarlin, which directly led to many friendships and my own involvement in meeting people all over the world, not to mention hosting a little collection of a few Alaska Dos myself) has enriched my life with so many friendships formed early enough in my life that they materially affected how I grew up. And the rest, as they say, was history...

So yes, I would consider myself as having grown up on FlyerTalk.

Majuki

I joined FlyerTalk when I was in my mid-20s, but I had been lurking for a year before my official join date and it was a year after that before I felt prepared enough to post. I can't claim that I grew up on FlyerTalk, but it has been a part of nearly my entire adult life.

While I had always enjoyed traveling, I had never pursued status. Before FlyerTalk, my premium flight experiences were limited to a round trip domestic first seat PIT-LAX on US Airways and one special flight JFK-LHR on the Concorde. (Yes, really.) My travels had been almost exclusively domestic, to Canada, or to a handful of Western European countries. My typical travel consisted of the perennial trip from the Midwest down to the Southeast for spring break or in search of warmer climates during winter.

I remember in college when a classmate suggested I should go to Asia to check it out. I laughed at the notion of traveling so far away. Shortly before that conversation, I remember reading about some underwater restaurant that had opened in a place called the Maldives, which I had to look up on a map. That definitely appealed to my inner engineer, but what would the chances be of me ever getting to such a remote part of the world? I ironically even had Marriott Rewards Platinum status one year when I was in college due to a summer internship where I stayed at a TownePlace Suites. Of course, I didn't have the travel internationally or even domestically to take advantage of the status in the days when it still meant something. I did have the wherewithal to get the Marriott Rewards Visa, which I happily used at Marriott hotels... and 100% of my other spend too because who needs more than one rewards credit card?

My first flirtations with FlyerTalk happened a couple of years later when I was working at my first full-time job. I had flown to Barcelona in July 2008 to visit with a friend I had met during a summer study abroad program in college. We toured around the entire east coast of the Iberian Peninsula, making it all the way down to Gibraltar before heading back up via Madrid. We had a great time, but I was getting gouged at every opportunity taking cash out of ATMs at €5 per transaction and with a 3% foreign transaction fee. My trusty Marriott Rewards Visa also carried a 3% FTF at the time while happily earning 1x everywhere I went!

On my way to and from Barcelona I transited via AMS. Since I didn't have airline status and was traveling in economy, I waited around in the terminal for my flight, paying both for Wi-Fi - I remember it being atrociously expensive, around $10 for 30 minutes - and the finest of cuisine that Schipol had to offer at Burger King. As I boarded the Northwest flight home on the A330, I was thinking that those business class seats looked so comfortable as I schlepped back to where I belonged in my aisle seat in the middle group of seats among the last few rows of economy.

In 2008, I was also living in the Bay Area for the first time, and, as a result, I started taking the AA flight SJC-ORD because this was the only nonstop - or direct, as I would have said then - flight to O'Hare at the time from SJC. Coincidentally, AA had made the announcement in 2008 that it was going to start charging for the first checked bag. I casually complained about this to a friend of mine who replied, "Oh. I get two free bags with United because I have status." I was shocked, and I asked, "Isn't that something only business travelers who are flying all of the time able to achieve?" "No, the lowest tier status is completely attainable, even for someone with your travel patterns. Look at the flights you take to get back home. You go back 2 or 3 times per year? Add that up if you had taken AA or its alliance partners to Barcelona, and you'd be sitting at close to 25,000 flown miles, which is good enough for the lowest level status with AA. There are some good resources online, such as FlyerTalk."

I started reading FlyerTalk, and within a year I had added to my wallet an American Express Platinum for Admirals Club access, a Capital One card for 0% FTF purchases, and a Fidelity Visa debit card for 0% FTF and reimbursement of ATM fees. I had also managed to regain Marriott Rewards Gold status, and I decided to follow my friend's advice of consolidating my flying behind one program to obtain status on AA in 2009. While I had done a couple of trips back home and I had a flight to London planned in December, I was still a couple thousand BIS miles short from 25,000. I ended up doing a mileage run SFO-BOS-ORD-SFO one weekend to bridge the gap. It would become the first of many.

In early 2010, I was proudly flying around on AA with my newly minted AAdvantage Gold status where I surprisingly still cleared some of my upgrades using 500-mile stickers. By the end of 2010, I achieved Executive Platinum while adding multiple countries and a new continent to my travels. In the years that followed, the knowledge I gained from FlyerTalk has afforded me outsized opportunities to travel to places I never thought I would go. It's profoundly changed my mindset. Instead of the annual family vacation to Orlando or the once in a lifetime trip to the Hawaiian Islands, those are now perfect destinations for a long weekend. The annual trips now are to the far reaches of the globe and lesser explored destinations. I even finally got the chance to eat at Ithaa, the underwater restaurant at the Conrad Maldives. Best of all, I've made some friends along the way from here who share the same passion for traveling and miles and points as I do. (While Mrs. Majuki certainly likes traveling and being the beneficiary of the perks, it's mostly the FlyerTalk crowd who doesn't think I'm completely irrational with what it takes to get there. )

ESpen36

I joined FT during my undergraduate years, and it has changed my life! FT has inspired me to move up through the ranks of status and cherish traveling around the world. Today, I have visited dozens of countries, on six continents, and had remarkable experiences.

Eastbay1K

I've known you over half your life? All I can say to that is "Get Bent"