The two best ones that I remember:

At one point the Pan Am shuttle (BOS-LGA-DCA) had a promo in 1988 that was something like this.........

2500 miles per segment
Get a 5000 mile bonus for a same day round trip
5000 miles per segment if one flew more than 10 segments in the month
A 20000 mile bonus if one flew 20 segments in the period.

Now while shuttle tickets ran something like $200 per segment back then, they also had a "student book" which cost something like $379 for ten tickets, but they were standby, but that was immaterial. I know people that bought two books, for less than $800 and spent a couple of weekends just flying back and forth and up and earned something like 120,000 miles at the time one could get two tickets in F to GIG or EZE for that mileage, and the face value of such tickets was perhaps $16,000.

Another one that some foreign friends of mine did: Several of the major airlines had standby student airpasses for foreign students, they cost something like $599 for a month and allowed for unlimited standby travel anywhere in the United States. they were NOT supposed to earn miles..............but they did..........and earned whatever bonuses were around as well. That sort of thing died out by 1991 though.....

1984 United was the first and only airline to fly mainline to all 50 states. They had a promo that if you could fly into or out of all 50 within 50 days, you would get unlimited first class for a year.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...-a68060fa8130/


i was only 14 at the time, but I used my timetable to map out my route!

DL actually has a loophole that's sorta similar to this that's still functional, although I'm not going to say anymore...

Marriott had some kind of promo circa 1994 with DL where I got 5K miles for one night's stay in Dayton. That was back when DL segment runs were much more rewarding.

If I had put all those hours spent on easySABRE back in the 90s with command lines into something else like post-grad education, I'd be a PhD. Not sure if that'd be a good thing or a bad thing, but doing mile-heavy trips on sale fares used to be a lot more labor-intensive, even though the programs were more rewarding.

In 1983 Republic Airlines had a buy one ticket, get one free offer. Didn't matter where you flew. So we took a quick weekend trip from SMF to Vegas in F (which was incredibly cheap) and got our two free tix and flew to Washington DC in F for our honeymoon. Being young and stupid (and my first long trip in F) I could not believe that the FA would continue to bring those little liquor bottles to me as long as I continued to ask for them. My head still aches remembering that...

Reminds me of America West back when they first began flying. Their B737-200 aircraft were in all coach configuration but the cocktails were complimentary. I had a quite a few on my flight from Los Angeles to Colorado Springs via stops at Phoenix and Pueblo.

BTW, nice handle you have there. My very first car was a used 1969 British Racing Green Triumph Spitfire...and my latest vehicle (a BMW M4) is definitely not a lemon! :cool:

I remember PSA having an award for 50,000 miles; which was a TWA F ticket, worldwide.