With 2007 drawing to a close, thousands of travelers are looking to clock up extra air miles in “mileage runs”.
Randy Petersen, editor and publisher of Inside Flyer magazine, explained how it worked to CBS News.
“A mileage run is for a frequent flyer who doesn’t quite make it at the end of the year,” he said. “They might be a flight short or 3,000 miles short and they’re just so close and they say you know what, I don’t have any more business travel the rest of the year, I’m going to go out and do a mileage run. So what they do is they simply go to the local airport and fly anywhere – they don’t really care.”
Petersen says that hundreds of thousands of travelers make these unusual journeys each year, clocking up the extra miles they need without even leaving the airport at destinations they arrive in.
American Airlines was the first airline to launch a loyalty program for its passengers, beginning AAdvantage in 1981. Since then it is estimated that more than 100 million people have joined frequent flyer or airline loyalty initiatives.
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