Fade out of the mileage run

[Fuerza]

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/upshot/the-fadeout-of-the-mileage-run.html?referrer=

I've never done a mileage run and I'm sure this isn't news to many. It is the first time I've seen this topic posted on mainstream media. I saw this article in my Facebook news feed. FB comments were hilarious!

 

[Matt]

I've always thought of mileage running as a waste of time and money. I was writing a post on it but stopped because I thought it was getting a bit offensive, and you should know I am not one to rock the boat. There is a huge subset of 'hackers' who swear by it. In fairness, I decided it was a valid way to earn miles, but it still was so labor intensive, and seemed so miserable that I couldn't see the personal value in it. If you were to approach it like 'lets go on vacation this weekend' and actually enjoy it then I'm down, but same day turns seem silly.

All told though it is clearly depreciating returns at play here, I can see the logic in someone with 98,000 AA bum in seat miles taking a 2K trip to get EXP, but there seem to be far to many people who have zero OPM (work paid) trips who hold status - it seems like madness to me to hold status as a 'tourist' when I haven't paid for a ticket since 2009 personally.