I feel so young.... My first mileage run was last year.... what was I missing?

William

i can't say when my first mi run was, the latest would be in 1985. however, before that, i would try to take connections & would swap rent cars as much as i could for the goodies they were giving. used an avis bag , tan w/red handles from that era recently. my wife often uses it as a carry on purse.

I was one of 68 people worldwide who completed the 50 State Marathon. We were awarded unlimited free First Class anywhere within the 50 states for one year. Due to a Flight Attendant strike in June of '86, we were given an extra month as well.

I flew 529,000+ free miles in First Class over the duration of my pass. Went to Hawaii 23 times that year!

Seat 2A: I will certainly acknowledge your expertise since you were one of the few people who qualified. But I thought the award was "1 year in the class of service you flew to earn it". That is, if you earned the award flying coach you got coach and if you earned the award flying first you got first (or something like that). I also heard that *none* of the people who qualified spent as much as the minimum which was predicted by UA. (Because FF's are more creative than the people who do the planning - for example, I heard that people would fly to SD and then drive one way (with others) to ND, rather than fly in and out of Denver in the middle.)

seat 2a- did you get mi's for the fc travel? wow!

sbrower: The award was as stated:
One year of Free First Class Travel anywhere within the 50 United States.

It was never tied in with what class of service you flew the qualifying flights on. I think the feeling at the time was that if you could fly to all 50 states within the 50 day qualifying period, that was quite a feat in itself!

As for spending, I never heard that UA had predicted a minimum. I do know that I had the least expensive fare of anyone who qualified - $2979.00 plus or minus a few cents. At our awards banquet, John Zeeman, the Man at Mileage Plus at the time, claimed that the average cost in airfares for the qualifiers was about $8500.00 per person.

I saved money by buying a month long bus pass for $340.00 and saved thousands of dollars by utilizing short interstate flights and taking busses between those cities.

For example, in knocking off the southern states of TX, AR, TN, GA, AL, MS & LA I flew from DEN to DFW, bussed to Little Rock, then flew LIT-MEM, bussed to Atlanta, flew ATL-HSV, bussed from Huntsville to Memphis, then flew MEM-JAN, bussed to New Orleans and finally flew MSY-DEN. Had I not bought the fixed price bus pass, I would have had to fly back and forth through the hub cities of Chicago or Denver at considerably greater cost.

I also utilized routings and connections to my advantage. For example, I bought a roundtrip ticket between New York and Honolulu. As most of you know, you can connect along the applicable routing so long as it's four hours or less, i.e. a connection, not a stopover. My routing looked like this:

Outbound:..EWR-CLE-MKE-DEN-LAS-SFO-HNL
Return:....HNL-SEA-PDX-DEN-OMA-ABE-LGA

One price, twelve states. Such a deal!

clacko: United offered all 68 of us who qualified 100000 miles in credit to our accounts provided that we flew at least 100000 miles over the duration of the pass

Thus, if you flew 98,000 miles, you wouldn't get even one mile of credit to your account.

Don't forget about the mileage run that Marilyn Monroe did between the Kennedy brothers. Talk about getting an operational upgrade!

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I remember reading about a pro golfer who did this as well.
Does anyone remember who it was?

I would say the first mileage runs were in 1979, when United and American (I forget who started it) were giving half-fare discount coupons to every passenger. Folks like me booked extra intra-California flights. I was "paid" two coupons to be bumped from one flight then I collected a third coupon on the next flight. The coupons were fully transferrable, and I had no problem selling them. The half-fare coupon promotion was the immediate precursor to frequent flier programs.

Seat 2A, thanks for sharing with us. ;-) The UA promo was before my time (being the Joven I am), but it reminded me of the creative routings I had to use to put together my Latin Pass trip.

The bus pass was a great, creative way to save on the expensive gaps.... in my case, a strategicaally booked 20,000 mile COPA open-jaw with stopover ticket did the trick.

If you ever post(ed) a trip report on your experience, I would love to read it. Thanks!


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Question: how did you deal with Delaware?? Was there Express to IAD? It seems that now there's no commercial service to Delaware.... I can't imagine there was jet service at one time!

[This message has been edited by Viajero Joven (edited 01-14-2002).]

Yes. It was The Walrus - Craig Stadler.

I knocked off Delaware by flying into Wilmington (ILG) from Dulles. It was a very short flight aboard a 737-200. From Wilmington, I took a bus to Detroit and flew DTW-ORD-CRW (Charleston, W.V.)

As for a trip report, I could definitely write one but some of the finer details would be a tad hazy.

Joven, did you ever post a trip report from your Latin Pass adventure? I'd love to read that! I could write some great trip reports though from years past, like the afternoon I started out planning only to hitch-hike from Lune River to Hobart in Tasmania. By the time the day was over, I'd flown up to Melbourne aboard an Air NSW F28 and over the next three days kept going via AN 767, a city bus, and finally the QRR trains "The Capricornian" and "Sunlander" and the local worker's train all the way up to Kuranda, up in the hills above Cairnes. And I thought I was only gonna hitch up to Hobart...

Once I was in Chile for a couple of months to go backpacking but there was a late spring snow in the Andes so I found a cheap deal up to Miami on a 4 stop Lloyd Boliviano 727, took a train to SEA, flew to DEN, caught two Dead concerts, hitched to Gallup, N.M. and barely caught the train to LAX and back to MIA, then returned to Chile for my bus to PMC and boat down to Puerto Natales and on and on.... All because there was too much snow... All true. I travel alone. And I'm impulsive. Weird but fun stuff has happened as a result. I've got all this stuff in a journal but for this site... well, I've probably overstepped my bounds already by saying this much.

The Editor of Airliners Magazine once approached me about doing the 50 State Marathon story so one of these months you might see it there.

But enough of me! This thread's about early mileage runs

[This message has been edited by Seat 2A (edited 01-14-2002).]

I saw an ad in a 1983 Pan Am timetable for the WorldPass program: 175,000 miles for 30 days of F class travel anywhere Pan Am flew for 2 pax - not bad.

I remember the Western Airlines deal (fly 2 r/t then fly anywhere for $150) from the early 80s also. I already had 1 trip in the bank so I did a one day trip SMF-LAX, visiting Disneyland then returning that same evening. Used the free ticket to visit Mexico City and managed to get the trip upgraded to F with another coupon. Western Airlines...the only way to fly!

I was also able to take advantage of United's 50 state Marathon, albeit at a lower level. If you flew to 30 states, you received an unlimited domestic travel for 1 month in First Class. For 20 states, it was 1 month in Coach.

I was able to obtain the 20 state level, on a 3 or 4 round trip business trips. On an outbound, I flew SFO - RNO - DEN - DSM - ORD - LGA (6 states). On the return, I flew EWR - ORD - MSP - DEN - PHX - SFO (3 more states). Since my trips began and ended at the same states (CA, NY), I used People Express to pick up other states. United had a flight from Burlington VT to Manchester NH. (picked up 2 states).

I recall reading an article about the 50 state marathon, with about 100 people qualifying for the top prize. One couple flew to all 50 states in First Class. I also ran accross another mileage runner, who was completing the 50 state level. His father was the primary traveler, and he was "picking up" the other several states, using his father's name. Of course, this would not be possible with the current security requirements.

In addition to the early and fantastic planned mileage runs described above, I remember hearing in 1985 about an early, "unplanned" (not to mention *unfortunate*) mileage run.

I believe that after the TWA Flight 847 hijacking in June of 1985, TWA awarded mileage to the passengers on the flight. Specifically, they awarded mileage for the aircraft's actual route shuttling repeatedly between Beirut and Algiers, in addition to the originally scheduled Athens-Rome route.

I hope no one here had the sad misfortune to earn those miles.